Everybody hates the windows store: Microsoft releases it's own *nix like package manager, bypassing the windows store.

[Bombastinator]

2 hours ago, Lurick said:

You know how you get a new windows machine and have to find a bunch of programs and run them one at a time and do reboots and whatnot? A package manager does away with all that crap and lets you run a couple commands and boom, all your programs are installed in one go and you can reboot in one swoop, no more clicking next and whatnot 100 times. Sure it's different but it's really efficient not only for bulk install but keeping things updated AND removing them as well since the package manager takes care of that and you just run a command (on linux) and update everything when you want or just update some things and wait on others depending on what you need to do.

It also helps when it is time to get rid of a program a certain amount of the vaunted stability of all the *nix systems is because they use package managers.  Basically everything uses package managers except windows.  It just works better.  I don’t know why exactly microsoft went with wizards instead.  A lot of decisions made in early implementations of windows happened because PCs didn’t have enough power to do  what was needed.  Linux is famous now for being able to run on ridiculously old and slow systems, but there was a time when even the most basic *nix required more hardware than a desktop PC could front.  There was a time when DOS would run on machines so weak a Unix wouldn’t run on them.  The first machine I had was 4.0mhz.  Literally 1000 times slower than the one I put together in 2014. It ran DOS but wouldn’t touch a Unix.  Unix was for big iron at the time.

Edited May 28, 2021 by Bombastinator

[YoungBlade]

2 hours ago, BuckGup said:

I think the per core pricing really turned many away. If you have a cluster with 10,000 cores and it's $2,000/core per year that's a huge investment in essentially something you don't and won't ever own

I agree that was a bad decision. I get why they did it - as core count increases, you won't need as many physical computers, so you won't need as many licenses - but it does mean that Windows Server 2019 will rapidly become much more expensive than the competition. Which is why I gave the caveat that they'd have to price it competitively.

 

If they keep this up, and core counts increase at the rate they have been for the last few years, in 10 years Windows Server is going to cost so much money that you could just use Debian for free, and then hire four IT specialists for each individual computer for $75,000 a year each, so they can all be monitored 24/7 accounting for time off, and still spend less money than you would for a license on your 1,024 core server in 2031. It would cost over $310,000 for the Datacenter version license on a machine like that ($6,155 for the base license which includes 8 cores, plus $304,800 for 2-core licenses at $575 each), assuming you can't negotiate a different agreement with Microsoft.

 

It would be a shift in philosophy to push for market share over current profits, but not much bigger than switching to the Linux kernel from NT itself. Big ships can actually change course as AMD has shown over the last few years. I'd like to think that Microsoft has the capability to see the business potential of taking less money in the short run to earn a lot more in the long run through gaining market share in a space where business are willing to pay a premium.

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, Rex Hite said:

I'm also unclear on what problem is being solved by this. I've been installing and uninstalling stuff for decades and of all the issues with Windows, this one seems trivial.

My guess it is less a technical one but rather a means to centralise and control what gets installed.

It's a tool/method that allows better integration with configuration management tools like Puppet, Ansible, Chef etc. You can already do silent automated installs with Windows Installer switches but consistency in how this is actually implemented by software devs isn't good so requires a lot of time by IT software packagers to do testing of this process so they can mass automated install software across the network.

 

Winget will streamline a lot of this process.

[leadeater]

7 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

It would be a shift in philosophy to push for market share over current profits, but not much bigger than switching to the Linux kernel from NT itself. Big ships can actually change course as AMD has shown over the last few years. I'd like to think that Microsoft has the capability to see the business potential of taking less money in the short run to earn a lot more in the long run through gaining market share in a space where business are willing to pay a premium.

Microsoft is a little stuck with keeping prices high for Windows Server licenses. If Microsoft makes the licenses cheaper then using Azure becomes less attractive as they actually discount the Windows license cost.

 

Also with a Volume License Agreement the licensing cost isn't the retail prices Microsoft publishes. Still expensive though, or just be an educational institution or non-profit and get huge discounts 

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, Papercut Captain said:

I would not bet on that. Microsoft tried the same with OneGet and it didn't really go anywhere.

OneGet was an open source project that Microsoft decided to support, it was never an actual Microsoft tool. 

 

 

OneGet never actually addressed the core problems of Windows Installer.

[Taf the Ghost]

Just to chime in: the Windows Store is horrible. And they've barely improved it in years. About the only thing that works well is updating specific stuff from a single screen.

[aDoomGuy]

3 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Does this mean they are going to drop store? Its about time they ditched that dead weight along with the preinstalled junkware phone apps.....

Hey! Some of us are too lazy to pick up the their phones when they get a text.  

[Helpful Tech Witch]

Hm..... will this bypass my 0x80072f8f error?

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Papercut Captain said:

Doesn't seem to be the case if you look their repo. I do remember something like this happening, they didn't even give credit to the dude until people noticed.

Yea, I meant Microsoft tool as in end to end created by Microsoft.

[Quackers101]

Wingat press enter and install firevirus

[Bombastinator]

Microsoft is famous for nose removing NIH issues.  Like even worse than the French military.  It’s a common enough problem though it is often a crippling one.  I don’t see how Microsoft can duck NIH issues with a package manager though.  Package managers came before Microsoft did. Like at all.  They still beat the snot out of wizards though.  There’s basically nothing good about wizards that I know of.  It’s all various kinds of disadvantage.  They might be runnable with less hardware is the only thing I can think of.

Edited May 29, 2021 by Bombastinator

[Big Stunna]

microsoft giving my ass more reasons to go MAC. tired of putting up with their bs lemme tell ya dat

[Bombastinator]

Just now, Big Stunna said:

microsoft giving my ass more reasons to go MAC. tired of putting up with their bs lemme tell ya dat

There’s no hiding from the BS. Mac has different BS is all.  I haven’t done a “which is actually worse lately” comparison.  Apple won for a while then Microsoft did for a while.  Peaked around win98.  Nt4 was a low point, and it kind of wobbled back and forth.  Microsoft did the initial bump Mostly by ripping off a bunch of stuff that Apple also ripped off but from xerox. Microsoft could be worse these days.  Moving to a package manager is a major step in the right direction imho.

[da na]

7 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Does this mean they are going to drop store? Its about time they ditched that dead weight along with the preinstalled junkware phone apps.....

Yeah, I've been trying to figure out how to kill Your Phone for years. Constantly taking up 2% or so of my CPU and I've never even opened it.

[Bombastinator]

As far as Microsoft hate goes the windows store is a pretty minor evil.  The refusal and foot dragging involved in the whole multitasking thing though that wound up producing thread programming simply to end-run Microsoft’s obstructionism THAT was hate worthy. 

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, wat3rmelon_man2 said:

Yeah, I've been trying to figure out how to kill Your Phone for years. Constantly taking up 2% or so of my CPU and I've never even opened it.

This process doesnt run for me, and I dont think I ever opened it either.

 

Also killing a windows app is easy, in taskmanager find the process, go to processes tab, open file location, take ownership (if needed), rename process to "myphone.bak" (or whatever the process is called)

Done.

 

Or you try this.

privacy > background applications

 

 

[jagdtigger]

5 hours ago, aDoomGuy said:

Hey! Some of us are too lazy to pick up the their phones when they get a text.  

By phone app i meant all the preinstalled crapware(cortana, ppl, etc....)

[Rolling2405]

8 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

The advantage of package managers is they better replace installation and uninstallation wizards which are famous for various problems.  If windows used a package manager DDU would never have even been a thing.

Is there still a GUI or do you have to type stuff into a CMD/terminal thingy?

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, YoungBlade said:

I'm hoping that Microsoft eventually ditches the NT kernel and just uses the Linux kernel, with "Windows" as basically a desktop environment with a really solid, proprietary version of Wine, along with a bunch of proprietary drivers and utilities. For people who don't care about free-as-in-speech software, such an OS would be ideal for just about every application.

LOL, that is not happening. Linux might be okay for tinker computers, but the average person is not willing to put up with coderot of Linux.

 

This package manager is a sorely needed alternative to NuGet (which Microsoft largely used before acquiring github) for compiled binaries, where NuGet is for precompiled libraries (dll files.) They're probably rolling it out to fill out the missing feature list needed to use cmake, because good god is it ever a huge pain in the ass to use cmake on windows and have to download and compile garbage like CEF just to compile OBS just to compile a 40KB plugin. The amount of effort required to do development work, is greater than that of Linux or FreeBSD because on Linux or FreeBSD you can usually just go "apt get" or "pkg install" or something of that nature and just install the thing you need.

 

The thing that does show up if you look at the github for winget though, is that it's also intended to do software pulls in enterprise environments. So that might solve a bunch of issues in environments where everyone needs to have something installed and kept up to date that isn't part of Windows Update.

 

[Jet_ski]

Skype, a Microsoft product, installed through the Windows Store has less functionality than Skype downloaded through the browser. It’s a completely different product. As if Windows Store is a store for mobile apps that are not meant to be desktop applications. That was the last time I used Windows Store, 2-ish years ago.

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, Thomas001 said:

Is there still a GUI or do you have to type stuff into a CMD/terminal thingy?

I assume a gui should be pretty easy to do.  GUIs have been done for package managers before.  I haven’t seen this new Microsoft thing though so I don’t know.

[RejZoR]

2 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

I assume a gui should be pretty easy to do.  GUIs have been done for package managers before.  I haven’t seen this new Microsoft thing though so I don’t know.

There is online one called Winstall. It churns out BAT, .ps and just the noodle you can drop into Terminal. You can also create packages with it.

https://winstall.app/apps

 

Couldn't find actual local one...

[YoungBlade]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

LOL, that is not happening. Linux might be okay for tinker computers, but the average person is not willing to put up with coderot of Linux

 

The average user wouldn't even realize anything had changed. Most people don't even know that Windows 98 and Windows XP have different kernels.

[WolframaticAlpha]

13 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Microsoft Store is already there. Instead of reinventing the whole thing, why not just make it less stupid and clunky? Make it faster, easier to navigate, give users ability to have favorites and create packages that could be installed with single click. And all in comfort of GUI. Last thing I want is to have stupidity from Linux to take over aka spending more time in god damn Consoles/Terminal than actually comfortably using the damn thing.

I really don't know, but there is nothing to be afrad about of the terminal. The GUI takes a lot of steps. Even on brew(for OSX), I found installing software a lot easier than dragging an icon to the applications folder.

 

 

 

Many people will gladly trade a GUI store for a CLI package manager. Imo, there should be both.

[aDoomGuy]

6 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

By phone app i meant all the preinstalled crapware(cortana, ppl, etc....)

Ah yes indeed. I can't even use Cortana here but she still wants to install.  

 

That we can fully agree on lol.