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Comment by SushiHippie | Hacker News Reader

This article is actually right that I downloaded the old version for Windows (would not happen on another OS, as there are maintained packages in most of the package managers).

But I just checked with the newer version and I didn't see a difference when testing with my 2.5GbE LAN (still 2.3Gbit UP and 1.9Gbit DOWN)

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Do you really want Microsoft to maintain a centralized software repository from which you, yes, you, are supposed to install almost all of the software you'd like to use? Do you, really?

It's always such a bizarre experience when people advocate for centralized repositories for Windows. Windows, unlike Linux, comes in very few flavours/versions (and with decent backwards-compatibility story), so the application developers can very well be (and in practice, well, are) expected to build the apps for the Windows versions they care about and then use their web-sites to distribute it.

In this case with iPerf3 we just have a sad story of two forks, and the group that owns the namesaked website for some reason could not be bothered after 2016 to re-upload the releases of the other group. Well, similar things happens in "official" Linux distros as well, with severely outdated packages.

I, really, wouldn't mind installing most of my software from Microsoft maintained repositories. The kinds of things that drive me nuts are when these are the ONLY place you can get things and you can't just add other repos like you can on any Linux setup. Managing distro variations doesn't really come into why I like to use centralized repositories.

If winget had appeared a decade or two earlier it might have replaced the need for every Windows app to ship an auto-updater.

> Do you really want Microsoft to maintain a centralized software repository from which you, yes, you, are supposed to install almost all of the software you'd like to use? Do you, really?

I'd actually love for that, yes. Just google "download VLC" - the top link does refer to VLCs official site (probably because they paid for or got donated the top spot), the second one goes to an IT newspaper, the third one to something uBlock flags as badware risk, the fourth one another newspaper, the fifth one someone offering VLC with a newsletter subscription, and finally the official page.

And that's the reality for a lot of popular Windows software. Part of that is obviously the responsibility of Google that can't even keep the top software search results free of advertising grifters (the newspapers) or malware, but the larger part is on Microsoft for not offering a centralized store for decades.

In contrast, on Ubuntu a simple `sudo apt-get install vlc` is enough, and (bar a supply chain corruption) I can be reasonably sure that I get a stable, unmodified version of VLC. Oh, and when I run a `sudo apt-get remove --purge vlc` it is gone... in contrast to a lot of Windows software with badly written uninstallers (because MSI is an utter PITA to develop against), that leaves remains everywhere across the system.

Well, good news: VLC is in Microsoft Store [0]. Go there and get it straight from the horse's mouth! And the best thing is, it has been around for a decade already.

[0] https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/xpdm1zw6815mqm?hl=en-us&gl...

Well, bad news: VLC team is pretty explicit about their negative views about app stores in general, as well as the microsoft store specifically.

VLC: App Stores Were a Mistake (twitter.com/videolan) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39798565

More here: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/19/vlc-vs-the-app-stores/

> Currently, we cannot update VLC on Windows Store, and we cannot update VLC on Android Play Store, without reducing security or dropping a lot of users…

> If you do wonder why we don’t update VLC on the Windows Store or why VLC/iOS can’t connect properly to OneDrive shares, it’s because Microsoft Kafkaïesque bureaucracy refuses to help us.

So maybe you don’t want to use centralised app stores with commercial control, and instead want to download software directly from the authors.

Except that in Ubuntu and Debian (and likely other major distros) you don't get the unmodified version of VLC, you get the crippled version with missing features. I recently spent a day trying to use VLC on Debian and Ubuntu to stream video from network camera (which works on Windows) only to find that Linux distros removed some VLC library that was required for this to work. So i used appimage version instead which did have the missing library. Linux distro packages are no longer easiest or best way to get working software.

> Linux distro packages are no longer easiest or best way to get working software.

Debian explicitly ships free software. They make no apologies for the impact on functionality if software authors depend on non-free elements, for software that they package. This has always been true, and is always a source of complaint from people who prioritise functionality over freedom.

Seems like the 'problem' was non-free code:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=981439

Just an aside, when I'm forced to use windows, installing programs with choco is a much better experience.

It's not quite linux package management, but, it beats the pants off any other way.

I am a big fan of winget these days.

Winget definitely has its warts but is useful enough for me that I use it almost exclusively now to install and update programs.

I've found that it occasionally just..... fails, and then works on the second attempt for, well, reasons? No idea.

I was able to get up to 35-37 Gbps between my host-guest with a virtio NIC with the outdated iperf3.exe, which I did indeed acquire from the site mentioned in the article. That seems like plenty of perf, to me, considering the fattest link I could possibly have in my house would be ~35Gbps if I aggregated all the ports on my switch. (... and filled my Threadripper system with nothing but NICs, I guess?)

I actually get ~7 Gbps, not 10Gbps, out to my real network. I haven't dug into what the issue is but when hitting my real network the guest clearly becomes bottlenecked by CPU, so I doubt iperf3 is to blame. (The host does not have this problem despite being on the same bridge, so I'm guessing there is some host-guest optimization I'm hitting in the virtio driver in the former case.)

Now that's a low-latency, high-bandwidth link. If you're testing "high latency, high-bandwidth" as purported in the article, and that link is apparently ~40Gbps or fatter, you're probably running on a "real server" in a "real datacenter" somewhere. I can tell you I wouldn't be burning a Windows Server license just to verify my L2/L3 connectivity is configured correctly.

I am sure MS would love if I bought two licenses of their proprietary operating system just to use this proprietary network testing client, but my pockets are not infinitely deep. (As I already spent all that money on the Cisco-branded optics. /s)

Windows Server is barely used anywhere anymore outside of Azure and niche IT operations that demand it. CentOS Linux, Amazon Linux, and Debian Linux run on 100's millions to a billion boxes.

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