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Comment by AndrewDucker | Hacker News Reader

Windows still lets you download and install software last I checked.

For now. My guess is that one of the reasons Valve has been working so hard on the Linux gaming front is the fear of this changing.

Yes, Valve steered towards Linux right at the time Microsoft made some noise about privileging its store, when they were bent on mimicking Apple in all things. MS seem to have come to their senses later on, but by then Valve had built too much stuff to throw it all away.

This should really be a case study: don’t piss off your customers and developers before you have all your ducks in a row. Something that clearly others have not learnt, e.g. RedHat with their CentOS fumble a few weeks ago.

You're saying they may take an Apple approach and attempt to further scare people from downloading trusted .exe's and such?

I think Microsoft has been having a bit of a change in attitude just because they're more focused on making money in software. They don't care where you buy it so much as they get a chunk of it somewhere. But what do I know.

Windows 10X original design, which got delayed due to COVID, uses sandboxing for whole userspace applications, regardless if they are UWP or Win32 based.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztrmrIlgbIc

If the software is new or obscure then it'll be blocked by Defender unless the user knows the override ritual. Code signing may help.

Feels silly comparison...if someone can't dont that you can rule out them running Linux.

Sorry if I was unclear. The code signing requirement to bypass the ritual means Windows is more of a walled garden than Linux.

Not everything. Some things, Windows Defender will erroneously and (somewhat) silently remove, causing inexplicable errors or crashes while hiding its actual errors in a notifications center. It gets really annoying sometimes after doing updates of actually desired software.

Does MS allow one to sell games for both XBox and Windows?

For Xbox you must use the Xbox Store. Why are you changing the goalpost though? They only mentioned Windows.

Which allows you to just plainly sell games from your own website or use one of the many stores.

Oh side note, you can change your Xbox into a "devkit" and install basically any homebrew app. So technically, you can bypass its walled garden.

One addition, you can sell on all stores at the same time.

Yes. But you don't need "allowance" on Windows.

You'd need one for the Xbox store or the MSFT store. But so far, you can sell something both through the MSFT store, with Xbox branding or not, and outside of the MSFT store.

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