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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

Windows is an order of magnitude better in this regard.

It used to be, but only in cases where your distro doesn't just package whatever software you require. Nowadays I prefer Flatpak or AppImage over crappy custom Windows installers for those cases. They allow for sandboxing and reliable updating/deinstallation.

These days, I equate anything that ships via docker/flatpak first as built by someone that only care about their own computer, especially if the project is opensource. As soon as a library or a tool update, they usually rush to add a hard condition on it for no reason other than to be on the "bleeding edge".

I'm with you on this, but I do want to point out that a big reason that people will update bundled libraries like that is because they don't want to put the effort in to see whether their bundled library versions actually have any critical vulnerabilities that affect the project. It's easier to update everything and be sure that there are no critical vulnerabilities.

In other words, the Microsoft Windows update process as applied to software development.

And yet I'm constantly getting asked when we'll support Windows containers at my office.

We've given up on native Windows containers in OCaml after trying to use them for our CI builds for many years. See https://www.tunbury.org/2026/02/19/obuilder-hcs/ for our recent switch to HCS instead. Compared to Linux containers, they're very much a second-class citizen in the Microsoft worldview of Docker.

This is because your team doesn’t know how to ship software without using containers.

If you have adopted a bad tool then people are likely to want the bad tool in more places. This is the opposite of a virtuous cycle and is a horrible form of tech debt.

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