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What does this article have to do with the Mac App Store? You can easily disable gatekeeper by right-clicking on a pkg. I don't see any similar mechanism on Wi

by yarou 11y ago

What does this article have to do with the Mac App Store? You can easily disable gatekeeper by right-clicking on a pkg. I don't see any similar mechanism on Windows 10, and anyway, the article is discussing how UWP would lock down APIs for developers, which leads to an overall adverse selection situation for game consumers. And it's laughable that you think Windows 10 is even remotely comparable to Linux for "portable applications". How are Win32 executables portable at all? They don't even work between versions of Windows. Win32 API is still a mess and pretty much everything about Windows is not standards compliant.

KirinDave 11y ago
This complaint is that at any moment, Microsoft might add a feature that only UWP gets. It's not like you can't run unsigned apps on Windows either. Hell, you can run unsigned UWP apps too! You just need to enable developer mode. Apple has this exact same facility in the Mac app store. And has an even tighter lockdown on the iOS store which we all mysteriously pretend is different somehow because reasons and 30somethings nostalgia. Linux on portable devices such as laptops is a comedy of errors, failed device driver support, excuses, and politics breaking battery life. If you say otherwise, you have much lower standards than I do for a modern laptop. > How are Win32 executables portable at all? They don't even work between versions of Windows ... Wait. Wait... I just read this. What? I have DOS executables that still work in windows, let alone very old win32 api executables. Do Linux executables work somewhere else besides Linux without someone bending over backwards to support them (e.g., FreeBSD?).
- ryao 11y ago
  Those DOS binaries work on Linux with DOSBox. The Linux binaries also work on SmartOS (OpenSolaris).
  - KirinDave 11y ago
    I know that options exist, but uh... I mean Wine doesn't count? It's more the absurd claim that Win32 as an API hasn't made good nods towards backwards compatibility. It has.
    - ryao 11y ago
      DOSBox is a separate project from Wine. It has also been said that DOSBox backward compatibility is better than cmd.exe on recent versions of Windows. That being said, Linux can run old binaries just fine. You just need the libraries. Windows does not have a stable syscall API, so that cannot as easily be done with Windows. As for win32, Sun tried to standardize the Windows API during the DOS days to ensure backward compatibility, but Microsoft killed it.
      - KirinDave 11y ago
        I'm still not sure how this interjection is relevant to the conversation at hand, but thank you for the interesting information. From what I can tell, you're executing a playbook based on prejudices and not an actual argument. Is OSX less arbitrary in its UI or less locked down? Could it be that developers HAVE to accept Apple's locked down game environment for iOS because it's the only platform that does a good job of combating game piracy? Is the Android App Store actually any better in this regard? Maybe. Maybe not. But all I see here is a very biased set of standards. Windows 10's App store is far less important to the industry than the iOS store in the large, as far more software moves through it. I'm actually hoping for a good discussion of why people are comfortable with the iOS store beyond, "I have historical reasons to hate Microsoft but not Apple." I clearly will not get that from you.
        ryao 11y ago
        The article is about desktop gaming. The reason epic is upset is that Microsoft is making new APIs UWP-exclusive, although I had to read more things to learn that, They feel that Microsoft is pulling the rug out from under them. The reason they are not upset about anything Apple is doing is that Apple does not restrict APIs to its Mac OS X App Store. They really do not care about iOS because it was locked down from the beginning (as were mobile devices in general), so there is no rug to pull out from under them. Windows has always been a mediocre platform. I was really happy when I got off it because I no longer had to deal with reboots for updates, disk fragmentation, viruses/malware, micro-managing software updates, yearly reinstalls to get cruft off the system, everything I install thinking it is so important it should autostart (which is really a problem of being able to execute code during the installation process), etcetera. Prople who suffer from Stockholm syndrome over the abuse they have from running Windows think such things are a normal part of having a computer, but they are not. Sane platforms do not have such problems and Windows is just not a sane platform. As for "I have historical reasons to hate Microsoft and not Apple", it is the opposite. By the time that I obtained my first computer (running Windows), Apple's colorful iMacs looked like children's toys and before that time, I had been traumatized by parents who tried to pass off children's toys as computers. Apple's ridiculous hardware designs combined with my experience of my parents' outright lies lead me to believe that Apple was trying to replace actual computers with inferior substitutes that looked pretty. Until Mac OS X, that was not far from the truth, but I did not know that at the time and developed a deep seated hatred of them. Things slowly changed over the years as I began to see the technical merit in what Apple had done, first with iOS after I found Android to be s terrible OS design and then with Mac OS X fr it being a POSIX system like Linux and being Darwin like iOS. That being said, hatred just is not a healthy thing and any dislike I have for any vendor's software is not worth harming my health by doing something as silly as hating them. I already went down that path once with Apple for irrational reasons. There really is no reason for me to go down that path again. As for iOS, you are trying to get a discussion over iOS from the wrong person. The right person should be yourself, but if you cannot see what is wrong with the other options on the market, then there probably is no one who can explain it to you. iOS design is great (e.g. no garbage collection outside JavaScript, no annoying app drawer, no noticeable UI lag that gives me headaches, consistent UI design, etcetera). It is an excellent stand-in for WebOS until the day that I get a sane Linux distribution (i.e. proper package management, no Java, X Windows, etcetera) running on smartphone hardware that I like. Given that I have my hands full with non-mobile platforms (laptops excluded), that will probably be a very long time.

by yarou 11y ago

KirinDave 11y ago

This complaint is that at any moment, Microsoft might add a feature that only UWP gets. It's not like you can't run unsigned apps on Windows either. Hell, you can run unsigned UWP apps too! You just need to enable developer mode. Apple has this exact same facility in the Mac app store. And has an even tighter lockdown on the iOS store which we all mysteriously pretend is different somehow because reasons and 30somethings nostalgia. Linux on portable devices such as laptops is a comedy of errors, failed device driver support, excuses, and politics breaking battery life. If you say otherwise, you have much lower standards than I do for a modern laptop. > How are Win32 executables portable at all? They don't even work between versions of Windows ... Wait. Wait... I just read this. What? I have DOS executables that still work in windows, let alone very old win32 api executables. Do Linux executables work somewhere else besides Linux without someone bending over backwards to support them (e.g., FreeBSD?).

ryao 11y ago
Those DOS binaries work on Linux with DOSBox. The Linux binaries also work on SmartOS (OpenSolaris).
- KirinDave 11y ago
  I know that options exist, but uh... I mean Wine doesn't count? It's more the absurd claim that Win32 as an API hasn't made good nods towards backwards compatibility. It has.
  - ryao 11y ago
    DOSBox is a separate project from Wine. It has also been said that DOSBox backward compatibility is better than cmd.exe on recent versions of Windows. That being said, Linux can run old binaries just fine. You just need the libraries. Windows does not have a stable syscall API, so that cannot as easily be done with Windows. As for win32, Sun tried to standardize the Windows API during the DOS days to ensure backward compatibility, but Microsoft killed it.
    - KirinDave 11y ago
      I'm still not sure how this interjection is relevant to the conversation at hand, but thank you for the interesting information. From what I can tell, you're executing a playbook based on prejudices and not an actual argument. Is OSX less arbitrary in its UI or less locked down? Could it be that developers HAVE to accept Apple's locked down game environment for iOS because it's the only platform that does a good job of combating game piracy? Is the Android App Store actually any better in this regard? Maybe. Maybe not. But all I see here is a very biased set of standards. Windows 10's App store is far less important to the industry than the iOS store in the large, as far more software moves through it. I'm actually hoping for a good discussion of why people are comfortable with the iOS store beyond, "I have historical reasons to hate Microsoft but not Apple." I clearly will not get that from you.
      - ryao 11y ago
        The article is about desktop gaming. The reason epic is upset is that Microsoft is making new APIs UWP-exclusive, although I had to read more things to learn that, They feel that Microsoft is pulling the rug out from under them. The reason they are not upset about anything Apple is doing is that Apple does not restrict APIs to its Mac OS X App Store. They really do not care about iOS because it was locked down from the beginning (as were mobile devices in general), so there is no rug to pull out from under them. Windows has always been a mediocre platform. I was really happy when I got off it because I no longer had to deal with reboots for updates, disk fragmentation, viruses/malware, micro-managing software updates, yearly reinstalls to get cruft off the system, everything I install thinking it is so important it should autostart (which is really a problem of being able to execute code during the installation process), etcetera. Prople who suffer from Stockholm syndrome over the abuse they have from running Windows think such things are a normal part of having a computer, but they are not. Sane platforms do not have such problems and Windows is just not a sane platform. As for "I have historical reasons to hate Microsoft and not Apple", it is the opposite. By the time that I obtained my first computer (running Windows), Apple's colorful iMacs looked like children's toys and before that time, I had been traumatized by parents who tried to pass off children's toys as computers. Apple's ridiculous hardware designs combined with my experience of my parents' outright lies lead me to believe that Apple was trying to replace actual computers with inferior substitutes that looked pretty. Until Mac OS X, that was not far from the truth, but I did not know that at the time and developed a deep seated hatred of them. Things slowly changed over the years as I began to see the technical merit in what Apple had done, first with iOS after I found Android to be s terrible OS design and then with Mac OS X fr it being a POSIX system like Linux and being Darwin like iOS. That being said, hatred just is not a healthy thing and any dislike I have for any vendor's software is not worth harming my health by doing something as silly as hating them. I already went down that path once with Apple for irrational reasons. There really is no reason for me to go down that path again. As for iOS, you are trying to get a discussion over iOS from the wrong person. The right person should be yourself, but if you cannot see what is wrong with the other options on the market, then there probably is no one who can explain it to you. iOS design is great (e.g. no garbage collection outside JavaScript, no annoying app drawer, no noticeable UI lag that gives me headaches, consistent UI design, etcetera). It is an excellent stand-in for WebOS until the day that I get a sane Linux distribution (i.e. proper package management, no Java, X Windows, etcetera) running on smartphone hardware that I like. Given that I have my hands full with non-mobile platforms (laptops excluded), that will probably be a very long time.