[pjc50]

The stupid thing is that a packaging system - MSI and later MSIX - has existed for a long time. But the tooling for it, to put things into packages, is a mess; nor is there a single tool even for Microsoft's own stuff. They really need to get onto dogfooding this stuff.

But then, in an environment dominated by corporate IT who have no real means of switching, why improve the product?

[1718627440]

The thing is that I trust the Debian maintainers, so I use dpkg to install my software. I do not trust Microsoft, so I use the browser to install software.

[acdha]

If you trust Microsoft enough to run their operating system, you trust them enough to develop a package manager.

Suppose, for example, that they caught up to where Debian was 30 years ago and Windows shipped with a default list of sources for the core OS to which you could add your internal or preferred partners (e.g. Adobe in many companies). Literally millions of systems wouldn’t have been compromised because they had unpatched apps. If they’d had a curated list of responsible vendors, multiple generations of people wouldn’t have been trained that it’s normal to run installers because a web page told you so.

[1718627440]

> If you trust Microsoft enough to run their operating system, you trust them enough to develop a package manager.

Yeah enough to run MS Windows in a VM, with services that mess with Windows Update and modified Group Policy.

I do install as most things as possible with the MSYS2 package manager.

> Suppose, for example, that they caught up to where Debian was 30 years ago and Windows shipped with a default list of sources for the core OS to which you could add your internal or preferred partners (e.g. Adobe in many companies). Literally millions of systems wouldn’t have been compromised because they had unpatched apps. If they’d had a curated list of responsible vendors, multiple generations of people wouldn’t have been trained that it’s normal to run installers because a web page told you so.

The issue is that Microsoft is already forcing a lot on its "users", if only installing things from the OS store becomes commonplace, then I think MS Windows will end up like iOS and that is way worse (for me).