alt Hacker Newssudo makes sense as a name, but it is worth noting that it hurts the original projects.
Famously, the curl project receives tonnes of issues and support requests from people who run `curl` in PowerShell, not knowing it is an alias meant for convenience instead of the actual curl command[1].
Sudo for windows is already relatively old and doesn't seem to have been adopted much, but my prediction is that adoption would mean people would complain on forums that commands they found on the internet don't work. "Why wouldnt it? I have sudo?". Then people will have to explain to them that "No you do not have sudo, you have the windows version of sudo, which is not real sudo" and it will confuse.
When it comes to tools, I strongly believe naming things similarly to concepts the user already knows is a disservice to the user. This isn't UX for your mom and pop, it is a tool to perform a job, and learners get confused when suddenly the same thing isn't actually the same thing at all. It is mislearning, and I would argue almost anyone who does mentoring has seen this in action.
[1]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/08/19/removing-the-powershe...
Replies
> sudo makes sense as a name
It doesn't though. There is no concept of a singular superuser like there is on UNIX. On Windows you have Administrator, but that is a role that can be assigned to any user.
And Administrators do not have full power, that would be the SYSTEM user. Which you cannot switch to with Sudo for Windows however - but you can with the runas tool, which has been around for decades.
> Famously, the curl project receives tonnes of issues and support requests from people who run `curl` in PowerShell, not knowing it is an alias meant for convenience instead of the actual curl command[1].
Well, that explains a lot of the issues I was running into a few weeks ago...
I, for one, have had to explain to Juniors multiple times that WSL isn't Linux, and why it's no replacement for Linux. Happens almost every time they try to do anything more advanced than a WSL hello world, and it inevitably fails.
I still let them try, because it beats me having to check "is wsl good now", and they learn much better from personal experience than someone more senior who uses arch btw just telling them "don't use windows"
>> Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.[0]
Between that quote and "You can't fix stupid" I always choose the one about circus.
*nix fanboys were totes fine with wget and ls being an aliases in PowerShell for years but when they found out what PS is coming to Linux they made a biggest stink. It didn't even mattered what 99.999% of the scripts which utilized that call were the simple 'get file' and nothing more.
[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rick_Cook#The_Wizardry_Compile...
Hopefully these aliases will be renamed to "Copilot-Sudo" and "Copilot-Curl" soon enough.