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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

So you're saying it's only a matter of time before Windows, which is 35 years old, might become a walled garden?

I think this is really unlikely. PC gaming is an increasingly important market for Windows in the consumer space. As more casual users abandon conventional PCs for increasingly capable tablets and smartphones, PC gaming is only becoming and even bigger piece of the pie.

The day Microsoft announces that the next version of Windows will be wholly incompatible with player's existing libraries is the day Windows ceases to be relevant to this market. Suddenly, Wine and Proton on Linux go from being "pretty good, but real Windows works better" to being the best option by a mile.

And this is without mentioning how important legacy support is to enterprise customers. A whole lot of the jank and inconsistent UI designs present in Windows 11 is there because enterprise customers still use old software that relies on old features and APIs.

Ugh, this just came to me and I hate to put this deviltry in the air:

But right now, kinda feels like Microsoft buys Steam or dies.

(Maybe not dies, but "becomes IBM.")

You underestimate the size of their enterprise business.

Valve is a private company, I highly doubt Gabe Newell will ever sell.

Seeing as Gabe viscerally hates Microsoft, I imagine so too. Also, what's the appropriate P/E ratio for a money printer?

How? They've recently bought a ton of gaming IPs, including Bethesda and id, to add to their existing sizable portfolio including some big names like Halo, Forza, Flight Sim, Minecraft, Gears. They seem to have a pretty solid agreement with EA to offer their EA Play service as a part of GamePass Ultimate, allowing access to a sizeable portion of that library for no additional cost to PC and console gamers. They're starting to push hard into Xbox-as-a-service and focusing efforts equally between PC and console, adding the xCloud "Game Everywhere On Everything!" hook.

People seem to forget that Microsoft is the second most valuable tech company in the world behind Apple. Unless some incredible monstrous change or disaster happens to/within the company, they're not going anywhere for a long time.

The ace in the hole is TPM. What happens when Microsoft starts shipping a TPM based anticheat and DRM? That would destroy Proton forever and allow them to lockdown Windows.

That's already a problem with kernel-based anticheats, they can't run in Wine/Proton.

For that, you have Valve stepping in and working with anti-cheat companies to find some middleground for Linux: https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/valve-making-linux-anti-c...

These anticheats are being ported to Linux by valve. If it was Microsoft's anticheat working in a TPM itbwoiodht impossible.

Also, Microsoft is already a DRM vendor with the Windows Store.

I can't wait for that day! Haha!

Well, I'm crossing my fingers the Valve Steam Deck satisfies my PC gaming needs (probably not though). I hate Hate HATE that more and more games are wanting to install System level services. It's absolutely not acceptable for the same machine my financial info and other sensative info is on has apps digging deep into the system.

I could run 2 machines but that's also a PITA, maintaining both machines and trying to decide when to use one vs the other. A gaming machine is powerful but I also need that power for video editing and other things. 2 VR rigs, one for non-gaming, one for gaming, would also suck. etc....

I want Windows to lockdown like Mac (and sure, you can turn it off?) but I'd like apps not to be able to muck with the system. Games have no excuse IMO.

I find that the argument embedded in that question isn't very insightful.

The developments of personal computing since subscription applications became prevalent and app stores were integrated into operating systems has made things quite different from the era that preceded this one.

Apple used to sell OS upgrades. Today you can basically run Windows 10 for free. The revenue streams are different these days and they have plenty of incentives to turn your OS into a mall.

Windows has essentially always been free. There have been something like two billion PCs sold running Windows. The number of people who purchased a non-OEM copy is relatively small.

But I believe upgrades have always been an extra purchase until Windows 8? Nowadays it's free OS, free upgrades to get you in the door and buy their services (M365 for Microsoft, iCloud/apps for Apple.)

I know at least Windows ME and Windows 98 SE came in boxes.

Until Windows 10 IIRC, Windows 8 was also a paid upgrade. Windows 8.1 acted like a service pack so it wasn't until 10 that upgrades became free, in a way. (Unless you're an enterprise customer, in which case 10 wasn't free either)

Free as in price? The price tag to customers didn't exactly mention the Windows fee, but the very few vendors that sold PC's without Windows pre-installed had a lower price on those options. Luckily many vendors seem to have concluded that Windows is not a sales argument anymore. Free as in freedom? MS has tried to block out Linux from beeing installed through various chips and methods.

> So you're saying it's only a matter of time before Windows, which is 35 years old, might become a walled garden?

Yes - Microsoft had credible plans to wall-off app installation via an iOS-stye app store. Valve considered this threat to be viable enough, they developed SteamOS and promoted Steam Machines.

Since then, Microsoft has continued its cryptographic crusade to plug all avenues for loading software that's not Microsoft-approved from pre-boot, right up to the userland. Currently, Microsoft already have a turnkey walled garden

I think they kinda tried with the windows store + arm windows surfaces. The market didn't like it.

To be fair, those Windows RT tablets were complete garbage.

I was working at Microsoft when they came out and they handed them out for free to every employee.

Due to the lack of any meaningful apps (not even Chrome), the thing was DOA. IE11 was the only option for browsing.

It is a walled garden since its inception. There is no package manager for building an open package ecosystem, as exists on other OSes.

I'd say the OS, rather than a language, having a package manager is more of a walled garden..

No it isn't. You can still install and even build packages using the manifest separately. It is just convenience, but doesn't prevent you from installing them yourself.

Prevent, no. However making your promoted paradigm of software installation rely on repos and package maintainers has lead to practices that make it unlikely that you will find any given piece of software in a form you can just drop onto your system and have it run. If you're really lucky there's a static version or an AppImage, if you're unlucky you're pulling down a docker container of someone's build environment and compiling it yourself, if you're really unlucky you have to do without the docker container.

That is on software developers, many of which refuse to package their software. There are Snaps, Appimages, Flatpaks, etc. Free software isn't like Windows where developers are always packaging their software. Package managers don't impact this whatsoever, and what you're basically complaining about is that unpaid contributors make something easier for people that they wouldn't otherwise be able to easily do without them.

I'm complaining that the community's reliance on package management has set the expectation that unpaid contributors make software work on the platform.

Where do you think PowerShell's OneGet comes from? It comes from embracing and extending AppGet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331287

You're thinking of WinGet.

OneGet is an open source project run by an open source group at Microsoft and has been around since 2014. It's based on linux package managers.

The embracing and extending here was "that's a nice idea, we'll re-write that from scratch and use the Microsoft Store as a GUI for it", which doesn't seem like the same thing to me at all.

I think that is a matter of perspective. Operating systems wholly reliant on package managers are arguably walled gardens, since acquiring and running software that only exists outside the official repos can be a hassle.

But I don't think most people mean either of these things when they say "walled garden". They are referring to ecosystems where the user's only choice for installing apps is an app store owned and maintained by the OS vendor.

Which is precisely what makes it not a walled garden: you can just, you know, put whatever software you want on it. That's the expected way to acquire software on Windows.

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