Sure I use the package manager in linux, and the google play store on android, and brew on mac, but they're all very limited and clunky by comparison. There is (relatively) little software for them. And if you want something older, or that isn't in the mainstream package manager, then you have to do unpleasant workarounds to trick or coerce the system into installing it. Then once you install something you have to hunt to find it, and there are bits scattered all over the system.
That's one thing I don't like about Windows, is that while it got much better at everything else, it also inherited the 'scatter stuff everywhere when installing' mentality from linux (or somewhere), and even went a step beyond that with the registry.
But at least we're beyond the days of 'DLL hell' and programs are usually pretty good about uninstalling themselves now. And there is some benefit to having user data under the user directory (especially for backups), although that could be an easy checkbox option during install or configuration.
Still would be better if 'portable program' style installation, where you just unzip it in a directory and there it is, the whole thing, right where you put it, was the default.
That hasn't been my experience at all. I have lots of old games on my Steam account and playing them on the latest Windows turned out to be impossible. Many games don't even start due to DLL hell. I even hunted down and installed old DirectX versions to no avail.
So much for Microsoft's legendary backwards compatibility. Wouldn't it be hilarious if one day it turns out Wine is the best way to play these games?
One day?
It absolutely does. I have friends running the latest Windows who still report speedups after reinstalling. Who knows what sort of cruft silently accumulates in a Windows system?
> you don't need to reboot all the time
You absolutely do. Not only do users still have to reboot, Windows has become ridiculously aggressive about rebooting and updating. It doesn't matter what users are doing, it will stop everything and spend an hour applying updates, rendering the computer useless because obviously people have nothing better to do than watch the computer reboot itself continuously while a progress percentage slowly increases on the screen.
I routinely have weeks of uptime, rebooting only to update...usually a 5 minute affair. I don't think an hour long update for Windows 11 even exists.
You are right about Windows being aggressive about wanting to reboot and update, though you're able to configure 'active hours' for this to happen outside of normal usage. Furthermore, you can use the Group Policy editor to fully customize every aspect of how Windows Update works if you're running Pro, Enterprise, or Educational SKUs, thereby disabling auto-reboot if you desire.
One such update just happened a few hours ago at work.
So I'm doing my job and Windows randomly loses its connection to the internet in the middle of my work. Who even knows why? This happens every day at work and only rebooting fixes it. So I Alt+F4 at the desktop to open the reboot/shutdown dialogue and it says "Reboot and update". I scroll up to another option that says "Reboot", and only "Reboot", and start the process.
Of course the goddamn thing starts updating the second it boots back up. Not only did it disrespect explicit my choice, it wasted 48 minutes of my time doing stuff that doesn't get me paid. I know exactly how much money that time is worth. Do I get to send a bill to Microsoft?
(And yes, that does make snaps a walled garden)
The original point though was implying repositories were better because they are trusted.
However if choice allows trusting a new repository you just came across, choice similarly is fine to trust an .exe from the internet too.
Not advocating for random .exe installing BTW. But honestly, for 99% of what we do we make trust choices based off Reputation and Probability guesses for outcome. We mostly don't have a clue what the executable code will do exactly.
In this case, I have a hunch that a well known repository is likely not to feed me malware. But I also figure that VLC/7-zip/notepad++ probably won't either. So will happily download their .exe. And I don't want anyone removing that option.
I call bullshit.
If you're not an admin, there's a whole host of things you just can't get done, and just makes life miserable for me, because that implicit suggestion that "some special person" should fo things scares users away from actually learning wtf it is they are doing. Systems do bog down over time, as evidenced by the need to clean up the massive amount of lint/waste that tends to be accrued over time. S-mode is an abomination. The effing continuous reboots as soon as you need to do something are the bane of my existence.
The Windows computer has become more anti-user over time, arguably anti-admin, and I'm just getting to the point of saying "fuck this shit, I'm out". I'm done being the guy M$oft devs externalize the costs of their lack of care to. Or maybe I'm becoming just like them with age in a sense.
t. Multi-household maintainer/debugger of all things technical
I can replace this with:
> if you can't `sudo`, there's a whole host of things you just can't get done
'Curious, you say you do not like being stabbed in the face, and yet you use a knife to prepare your dinner'
It's a matter of who gets to decide where the walls are and who to trust. App Store/Google Play/Windows Store/macOS Store are not and never have been curated for software the user can trust, only things that do not harm the perceived interests of their owners. They are not trusted sources.
Amen. The proliferation of knock-off apps, shovelware and spyware was not the future we wanted but it's exactly the one we built for ourselves. If you explore this conflict of interest between users, OEMs and developers, you start to reconsider your enthusiasm for the whole cloud computing era.
> installing software from untrusted sources is not normal
Funny, because you also hear exactly the opposite critique here all the time: trusted sources (App Store/Google Play/Windows Store/macOS Store) are walled gardens and represent a war against general computing and owning your device. I know you meant the Linux package repositories, but it applies to all stores.