[ChewFarceSkunk]

Should also mention online-only installers a la vs_buildtools from MS and a whole lot vendors more.

Want an offline installer? Easy peasy, just

- find one in a cobweb-covered thread in an obscure subforum on a vendor's site;

- manually compile a list of thousands of workloads your build tools would need, including optional ones, and create an offline installer yourself - using another machine that still has to be online - which will fail anyway if your target machine happens to be really offline;

- be told to basically GTFO for being an outmoded Luddite who opposes The Progress.

[dijit]

as a person who worked a lot in isolated environments, this was really frustrating.

from google chrome to visual studio: loads of software is extremely difficult to install offline

[MarkSweep]

I remember both of these programs you mention not being that hard to install offline.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95346

https://learn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/install/create-an-o...

The main challenge with VS is trimming languages and features you don’t need. But if you don’t care about size you can just download everything. And it has support for incrementally updating the installer and pruning obsolete packages.

[dijit]

I remember searching the internet for 25 minutes for each of them after discovering (annoyingly) that the installer that is given is not actually going to work offline. The ones you link work, but you really must search for it; its not presented as an easy to find option at all.

which is not my default expectation possibly because I was raised in the late 80s/early 90s.

[einpoklum]

Take that as a hint to avoid installing such software.

[vetinari]

It is hidden, but it is there:

    vs_buildtools.exe --layout c:\where\you\want\the\entire\installer --lang en-US

Have enoughh space there, current 2019 release is ~40 GB and 2022 is ~35 GB. It is updated each month, you can use the same command to update your installer (won't remove old packages though).

[ChewFarceSkunk]

Been there, done that, stopped updating when the layout got around 52 Gb. Decided to download only relevant workloads, which proved to be a failure on each reinstallation, even with all the recommended and optional workloads included as per MS docs...