Hacker News Reader

Comment by Joker_vD | Hacker News Reader

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 Well, similar things happens in "official" Linux distros as well, with severely outdated packages.

View on HN

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.

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

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

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com