Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years
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@lucas1 said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
@Magus The point is that is something we have to accept is that normal people don't care if the platform is fairly open.
Until they can't do something they want with their devices, then they start caring.
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@Magus True, but WinRT was really half-assed. The RT ecosystem was brand new, so the store was obviously still empty, Windows 8 was a universally hated disaster, and then they gave up and abandoned their customers 2 years later.
Hopefully this one will be handled a bit better, and they'll find a way to clarify things to avoid uninformed people buying them again.
Then again, the way they are trying to push things like Cortana, Edge and Bing integration, I wouldn't be surprised if they try to trick uninformed people into buying them to get a few more sales in the short term and end up ruining everything again.
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@anonymous234 said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
abandoned their customers 2 years later.
And Silverlight, and many other stuff. Betting on Microsoft tech ia risky stuff.
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@anonymous234 The thing with RT though is that it was mostly on tablets, where most people wouldn't know the difference. Because whether you believe it or not, 8 was pretty great for tablets - I had one myself.
If people had known a bit more about what was going on, Microsoft probably wouldn't have abandoned it, but they're not going to put a bunch of money into a platform that has no users.
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@Magus said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
Microsoft probably wouldn't have abandoned it, but they're not going to put a bunch of money into a platform that has no users.
They had 2, blakey and @RaceProUK
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@wharrgarbl I never had an RT tablet
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@Magus I gave up thinking what the anti-Windows and FOSS fanboys gave a shit about a while ago. Microsoft are damned if they do and damned if they don't. They have open-sourced massive parts of their flag ship dev platform and people are still saying they are evil ... they can't win.
Microsoft won't ever win the PR war. They will always win the business war.
.NET won me over Java when I did my first work placement and .NET 2.0 was new and it was a "Java improved". It wasn't massively better. Had a lot of missing libs. But It had a better IDE out of the box (VS2005 and tbh most versions of the IDE aren't really that much better than 2005) and the language had properties and loads of other cool stuff.
Microsoft do listen to their customers. Xbox One with the "play one console games" the fans and sony owned them and they bowed to market pressure.
Apple don't bow at all. There is a article on arstechnia where most people want a fast mac pro and are using hackintoshes.
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@lucas1 said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
they are evil ... they can't win.
Correct. They did enough evil stuff I'll never ever trust them. But I'd use visual studio with c#, that's good stuff.
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@wharrgarbl They didn't do anything evil.
Did they kill kids .. nope
Rape women ... nope
Murder people .. nope.Oh they fucked over another competitor ... naughty and not evil. I really could not give a fuck that they cost people that already had a lot of money a little bit more.
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@TimeBandit said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
@cheong said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
In additional to the fact that it'll only run Edge and IE as default and you cannot change it
False. If you make a browser and package it for the MarketPlace (and have it accepted ), you can run it.
Okay fixing it.
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@Magus said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
@anonymous234 No, it'a pretty much precisely what they did with RT, and it was rejected because people couldn't install anything they wanted on it.
I think it's a good, even necessary idea, but consumers got mad last time...
But in WinRT, they allow you to sideload Apps.
In Win10S I'm not sure given "marketplace only". So will Microsoft make "everything must be published even if it's in-house use only"?
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@wharrgarbl said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
@anonymous234 said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
abandoned their customers 2 years later.
And Silverlight, and many other stuff. Betting on Microsoft tech ia risky stuff.
To be fair, a lots of those once "50 raising javascript frameworks/libraries" are abandoned and replaced by yet another huge sets of javascript frameworks/libraries. And lots of them were created by Google. (Those APIs)
Being in software industry and want to be close on latest trend is about "to guess whether some technology will stick".
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@wharrgarbl Silverlight is another case of something losing a PR battle. People somehow thought it was just Microsoft-branded Flash, and that html5 meant that no one should need it anymore. Once again, Microsoft decided to let a very small community die, but only after they'd lost their brand identity.
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@LaoC said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
I've seen 21st-century Windows programs that required some data to live in a directory in C's root
Like Windows Update?
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@Gurth said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
Exactly. That was when "installing" started to mean something at tad more complicated than "unzip to a folderā.
On Windows, yes. Most macOS software is drag-and-drop install, from a zip file or disk image to the Applications folder (or wherever else you want, but the by-the-book location is /Applications).
The OSX way that it inherited from NeXTstep is pretty nifty indeed. A bit like AmigaOS had it from 2.0 on with its virtual PROGDIR: drive. But other stuff is just cleverly hidden on OSX, like file type associations. I'm not sure when exactly those are set up from their .plist files but they do have to go into a system-wide database. Later when you "uninstall" by deleting the folder (or even move it somewhere else), that stuff sticks around and you need something like AppCleaner to remove it.
But then, I suppose that from your perspective that again runs into the problem of keeping libraries etc. updated, since all but Apple-provided ones tend to come with each application separately.
That, too. Isn't that an objective issue? If you package it, you have to re-release for updates, how's that a question of perspective?
That single place used to be
C:\
on something like 90% of all machines in the age of DOS.This is a problem you canāt really solve except by disallowing users any choice in where they put files in the file system at all. If you let them, some people will just put stuff down anywhere and everywhere. Iāve seen more than one computer where the users had put just as much stuff (photos, word processor documents, PDFs, and whatnot) in the root directory of the hard drive as in their home folder where it belongs.
What about just not giving regular users write access to the FS root? That's a solution that every desktop OS in at least the last 15 years offeredāit's just that as a result of people's habit of putting everything all over the place, programs assumed they could write to
C:\
and shit started breaking as soon as you used a restricted account. Took them like 20 years to rein that in.I suspect these are the same kind of people whose desk or workbench is such a mess that they canāt find anything they need unless they rummage around for a while.
Not necessarily. My desk is always quite messy but I'm downright anal about my file systems. My wife is the opposite :)
@Jaloopa said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
I've seen 21st-century Windows programs that required some data to live in a directory in C's root
Like Windows Update?
I hope they'd at least respect
%SYSROOT%
or whatever it's called?! Yeah, I know, I'm probably naĆÆve ā¦
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@Magus said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
@wharrgarbl Silverlight is another case of something losing a PR battle. People somehow thought it was just Microsoft-branded Flash, and that html5 meant that no one should need it anymore. Once again, Microsoft decided to let a very small community die, but only after they'd lost their brand identity.
Actually Silverlight is more like "Microsoft branded Java applet", where Flash was to be replaced by SVG (a mix of Microsoft VML and Macromedia Flash by W3C when both parties submitted these two technologies for consideration of recommandation) but whatever. :P
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@cheong Yes? My point is that people thought it was Flash.
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@cheong said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
in-house use only
E_WRONG_DEMOGRAPHIC.
If you have your own helpdesk, you don't want S.
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@Magus said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
Because whether you believe it or not, 8 was pretty great for tablets - I had one myself.
It was, and if Microsoft started off with fully featured Win8 tablets while waiting for the ecosystem to evolve, and then telling people "hey, all those cool apps and games? We can let you have that on your desktop too", then maybe it could've worked.
But they got stuck on the idea of UX integration between desktops and tablets and pushed it out without realizing people don't actually want that all that much, and the next few years were spent backpedaling from that while trying not to admit they fucked up. Windows 10 is basically an OS made entirely of half-assed backpedaling from Windows 8.
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Windows 10S can be upgraded to Pro for free until the end of the year, and after that it will be $50.
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@Maciejasjmj I kind of see it as the opposite:
8 was an attempt to see how much the general public would let them get away with. They tried having a single OS on tablets and PCs, with apps that work between them, with an interface that was the same on either, so transitioning between them is easy. (Don't go all "It was AWFUL on the desktop!" on me. It wasn't. You don't minimize all the windows on your desktop to open programs. You don't mouse through menus. You either see it immediately or you search, and that's what 8 provided)
I think they expected that there would be heavy pushback, but they weren't wrong: The Surface line is incredibly popular, and just pulling themselves back a little was enough to get everyone jumping onboard with Windows 10. Overall I think their goal was a good one, and while I had no problems with the Win8 interface, I mostly have less with the Win10 interface (though afaik it doesn't have all the slide from the side gestures, which I considered very useful).
As to fully featured tablets, while the ecosystem grew? They did. One of those is what I have. But the thing is, most desktop applications are horrible on a tablet, because they were never designed with one in mind. Which means people still wouldn't use it, even if they were convinced to buy one, and then they'd convince their friends not to buy them, because what's the point when an iPad has all the apps you never wanted?
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@Magus said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
Don't go all "It was AWFUL on the desktop!" on me. It wasn't.
Some things were not good at all, others weren't a problem. The biggest issues I encountered (not with my own systems, which never used Win8) were with the use of making edges and corners of the screen active, given that the hardware in question wasn't touch-capable. That, plus the mess that was the start screen (and which they improved in the next iteration), was the one bit I noticed as being awful. It's just unfortunate that it was in a place where lots of users would notice itā¦
Remember, users don't notice good UIs, just bad ones.
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@LaoC said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
other stuff is just cleverly hidden on OSX, like file type associations. I'm not sure when exactly those are set up from their .plist files but they do have to go into a system-wide database. Later when you "uninstall" by deleting the folder (or even move it somewhere else), that stuff sticks around and you need something like AppCleaner to remove it.
Not āneedā as such every single time. Usually it works just fine, but there are times when the magic for some reason fails.
If you package it, you have to re-release for updates, how's that a question of perspective?
The question of perspective is whether or not it bothers you (as the user), probably largely based on whether you care about the wasted disk space for duplicate libraries, or more likely possible security holes that may get patched in one appās copy of the library but not in anotherās.
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@Yamikuronue said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
@cheong said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
in-house use only
E_WRONG_DEMOGRAPHIC.
If you have your own helpdesk, you don't want S.
So, if we only need to run Apps, only that some of them are not public one, we're still not target audience? That's fine.
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@Gurth said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
other stuff is just cleverly hidden on OSX, like file type associations. I'm not sure when exactly those are set up from their .plist files but they do have to go into a system-wide database. Later when you "uninstall" by deleting the folder (or even move it somewhere else), that stuff sticks around and you need something like AppCleaner to remove it.
Not āneedā as such every single time. Usually it works just fine, but there are times when the magic for some reason fails.
So yeah, it's magic but unreliable magic. Mac-ic :p
And just in order to pretend there was no installation. I don't know how moving a folder somewhere is supposed to be much better than double-clicking an RPM, being asked "Wanna install this?" and clicking "yes" plus entering your password. OK, potentially the Mac way makes it easier to install user-specific applications, but I don't see people actually doing that. Besides, the usual magic will fail big-time if the OS sets up something like a file type association with a program on a pendrive.If you package it, you have to re-release for updates, how's that a question of perspective?
The question of perspective is whether or not it bothers you (as the user), probably largely based on whether you care about the wasted disk space for duplicate libraries, or more likely possible security holes that may get patched in one appās copy of the library but not in anotherās.
For the user, there's a single potential drawback to the package manager: your distribution might not be supported. Considering how easy it usually is to repackage stuff, that's not a biggie, see Steam. Everything else (less waste, more secure, less bugs) is a no-brainer. For a developer, it's a tradeoff between maintaining a bunch of different spec/debian/whatever files and corresponding build VMs for occasional releases when they've fixed/improved their program versus a single build machine (if targeting Windows; otherwise the problem of supporting only a single distribution is the same) and more frequent releases whenever there's an important update to a dependency. Highly dependent on the kind of QA you want to do.
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@LaoC said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
So yeah, it's magic but unreliable magic. Mac-ic
So unreliable that over the last 12 years or so of Mac use, I donāt remember noticing it failing. That doesnāt mean it definitely hasnāt, of course, but if it has, itās not gotten in my way. In which case even if it did fail, itās no problem.
And just in order to pretend there was no installation. I don't know how moving a folder somewhere is supposed to be much better than double-clicking an RPM, being asked "Wanna install this?" and clicking "yes" plus entering your password.
Itās certainly easier than running an installer and having to click on all kinds of stuff like license agreements, choosing where you want to install (by clicking a button and then navigating your hard drive ā the Windows way so you canāt just drag an folder from an Explorer window into the Open dialog to choose that one), and then having to still click on plenty more stuff like āNo, I donāt want an icon on my desktop. Nor install an IE toolbar. Nor go to your website."
OK, potentially the Mac way makes it easier to install user-specific applications, but I don't see people actually doing that.
Neither does Apple, I think. Early versions of OS X came with a ~/Applications folder, but that fell by the wayside a long time ago, as I recall.
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@LaoC said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
I don't see people actually doing that
We have no control over what you see. ;)
Besides, the usual magic will fail big-time if the OS sets up something like a file type association with a program on a pendrive.
I think it only installs associations for applications that are on a non-removable device. There's some fairly clever tracking of things going on behind the scenes, and has been for a long time (the principles behind it predate OSX, IIRC, so it's something that they did and just kept on doing). I can't remember if the metadata is actually stored once per filesystem and indexed by inode; that'd be a fairly smart way of doing it, since it would allow the app to be found again quickly (with the right OS support) even if it was moved around within the mount, and to detect shenanigans if something more complex happened.
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@Gurth said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
Itās certainly easier than running an installer and having to click on all kinds of stuff like license agreements, choosing where you want to install (by clicking a button and then navigating your hard drive ā the Windows way so you canāt just drag an folder from an Explorer window into the Open dialog to choose that one), and then having to still click on plenty more stuff like āNo, I donāt want an icon on my desktop. Nor install an IE toolbar. Nor go to your website."
, that's more down to badly-designed installers and shitty devs bundling shovelware and crapware than anything intrinsic to Windows.
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@RaceProUK Only the last part (in quote marks), in my experience.
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@RaceProUK said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
badly-designed installers
It really helps that there's a standard installer on OSX (and in fact pretty much everywhere except on Windows) as that then gets rid of the UI parts and encourages developers to focus on describing what they need to actually do to install (e.g., copy these things to this place, run that post-install code with those privileges) and that's a heck of a lot easier to audit.
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@dkf Windows has that as well: Windows Installer. There's no technical reason a dev couldn't build an MSI package that does a silent install: it's just almost no-one does.
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@RaceProUK said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
it's just almost no-one does.
Well why is that?
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@dkf said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
@RaceProUK said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
it's just almost no-one does.
Well why is that?
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@LaoC said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
And just in order to pretend there was no installation. I don't know how moving a folder somewhere is supposed to be much better than double-clicking an RPM, being asked "Wanna install this?" and clicking "yes" plus entering your password.
Well, can you copy those folders back in order to move your installed programs to a new computer? Because that would be a major one.
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@Gurth said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
having to click on all kinds of stuff like license agreements
I see. You prefer "by opening this box you agree to the terms of licensure sight-unseen" style licensing.
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@Yamikuronue said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
"by
openingtouching this box you agree to the terms of licensure sight-unseen" style licensing.It's only a natural evolution!
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@Yamikuronue said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
I see. You prefer "by opening this box you agree to the terms of licensure sight-unseen" style licensing.
Shrink-wrap licenses aren't very valuable in the first place, legally speaking; the point when the customer should do their Due Diligence is earlier anyway.
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@dkf Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall that T&Cs that require you to accept them before you can even read them are legally unenforceable
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@Yamikuronue said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
I see. You prefer "by opening this box you agree to the terms of licensure sight-unseen" style licensing.
Unenforceable around here, so I donāt have any specific problems with them. Aside from that, I find license agreements in installers to be annoying, since seriously, how many people will be turned away by them after all? Oh wait, probably plenty of Americans.
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@anonymous234 said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
Well, can you copy those folders back in order to move your installed programs to a new computer? Because that would be a major one.
On a Mac? That should work for any program that does drag-and-drop installation. If everything is in one file or directory, it doesnāt matter for the receiving computer whether the program comes from a zip file, a USB stick, or over the network, after all.
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@Magus said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
@wharrgarbl Silverlight is another case of something losing a PR battle. People somehow thought it was just Microsoft-branded Flash, and that html5 meant that no one should need it anymore.
...and they were right on both counts. I remember thinking, when Silverlight first came out, "why are they even doing this? They're trying to compete with Flash when everyone who needs what it can do is already using Flash, so no one [within epsilon] is going to adopt it." And that's exactly what happened.
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@Gurth said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
I find license agreements in installers to be annoying
I like the fact that the installer's window takes about 25% of my screen, then try to show me a 2000 page license agreement, all through a little window that is only about 50% of the window itself.
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@Gurth said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
So yeah, it's magic but unreliable magic. Mac-ic
So unreliable that over the last 12 years or so of Mac use, I donāt remember noticing it failing. That doesnāt mean it definitely hasnāt, of course, but if it has, itās not gotten in my way. In which case even if it did fail, itās no problem.
OK, so OSX does it right by hiding the installation.
And just in order to pretend there was no installation. I don't know how moving a folder somewhere is supposed to be much better than double-clicking an RPM, being asked "Wanna install this?" and clicking "yes" plus entering your password.
Itās certainly easier than running an installer and having to click on all kinds of stuff like license agreements, choosing where you want to install (by clicking a button and then navigating your hard drive ā the Windows way so you canāt just drag an folder from an Explorer window into the Open dialog to choose that one), and then having to still click on plenty more stuff like āNo, I donāt want an icon on my desktop. Nor install an IE toolbar. Nor go to your website."
Sure, that's annoying bullshit. One more reason why installers in the form of executables are at best no better than a package manager handling simple archive formats and at worst an entry point for all kinds of system compromise.
OK, potentially the Mac way makes it easier to install user-specific applications, but I don't see people actually doing that.
Neither does Apple, I think. Early versions of OS X came with a ~/Applications folder, but that fell by the wayside a long time ago, as I recall.
@dkf said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
I don't see people actually doing that
We have no control over what you see. ;)
If I take your answer in the context of @gurth's: maybe you're seeing thingsā¢?
@RaceProUK said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
@dkf Windows has that as well: Windows Installer. There's no technical reason a dev couldn't build an MSI package that does a silent install: it's just almost no-one does.
According to that page, Windows Installer has been abandoned years ago. The last release was seven years ago and VS hasn't supported it in the last five. MS recommends WiX now, a side project of some employee.
@anonymous234 said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
And just in order to pretend there was no installation. I don't know how moving a folder somewhere is supposed to be much better than double-clicking an RPM, being asked "Wanna install this?" and clicking "yes" plus entering your password.
Well, can you copy those folders back in order to move your installed programs to a new computer? Because that would be a major one.
No, because packages can and usually do install files all over the place, and you'd lose the dependency tracking. You can make a full backup and move that to a new machine, or you make a list of installed packages and install them again on the new machine.
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@LaoC said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
MS recommends WiX now
Which also builds MSI packages
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@LaoC said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
If I take your answer in the context of @gurth's: maybe you're seeing thingsā¢?
My point was that, just because you're not seeing it, that doesn't mean that it isn't happening.
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@RaceProUK said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
@LaoC said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
MS recommends WiX now
Which also builds MSI packages
Yup. I mentioned that just as a guess at why it may be that MSI is not exactly widely adopted.
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@LaoC said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
MSI is not exactly widely adopted
It's used by loads of people though
OK, it's not universal, but it's still pretty widespread.
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@LaoC said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
MS recommends WiX now, a side project of some employee.
You do realize that WiX is basically just a wrapper around MSI...
Edit: If you don't understand how MSI works, you'll be hosed trying to write WiX. (WiX is simply an XML format that specifies how to build an MSI)
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@dcon said in Why desktop operating systems have completely failed at their job for the last 20 years:
MS recommends WiX now, a side project of some employee.
You do realize that WiX is basically just a wrapper around MSI...
Not really. I thought it was a toolset that builds MSI files. That's what its Github page says.