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The bloat in Windows is an interesting issue. I put together Windows OS images and a freshly-installed, before-updates Windows 10 image might be around 2 gigs

The bloat in Windows is an interesting issue. I put together Windows OS images and a freshly-installed, before-updates Windows 10 image might be around 2 gigs (maybe a bit more or less, I’m going from memory here). Granted, a Linux distro may hit that size with a lot more preinstalled software, but I haven’t paid much attention. Windows starts bloating when you apply updates. It keeps a lot around to facilitate rolling back updates if needed; this gets cleaned up over time but it can be an issue on a small disk. There’s ways to get the size back down (while sacrificing the ability to roll back updates that you’ve applied), but you don’t regain all the space. I get the feeling the Windows Update mechanism is a large legacy mess that is stuck having to account for corner-cases that have built up over time. Microsoft are improving it; I think it’s just a really big engineering task that they’re having to slowly work through. I vaguely remember something about the way Windows handles overwriting open files in-place which makes this worse, but I can’t remember the specifics off the top of my head.

_bxg1 7y ago
> I get the feeling the Windows Update mechanism is a large legacy mess that is stuck having to account for corner-cases that have built up over time. I get the feeling that Windows itself is a large legacy mess that is stuck having to account for corner-cases that have built up over time. Of course this facilitates its impressive degree of backwards-compatibility (one of its most desirable features), but still.
- Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
  Every time I try to play a game that I paid for on iOS that no longer works because Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility, I'm reminded of how thankful I am for Microsoft's efforts here. I really think the amount they've improved Windows under-the-hood over time is impressive, especially taking into account the constraints they've had to work within. On a related (though somewhat tangential) note I must say that I think MS tying WinRT (which as I understand it is the clean rewrite of the Windows API) to the Microsoft Store initially was a massive mistake. I still don't have a clear, confident impression of where I can or should use WinRT, even after all these years.

_bxg1 7y ago

> I get the feeling the Windows Update mechanism is a large legacy mess that is stuck having to account for corner-cases that have built up over time. I get the feeling that Windows itself is a large legacy mess that is stuck having to account for corner-cases that have built up over time. Of course this facilitates its impressive degree of backwards-compatibility (one of its most desirable features), but still.

Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
Every time I try to play a game that I paid for on iOS that no longer works because Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility, I'm reminded of how thankful I am for Microsoft's efforts here. I really think the amount they've improved Windows under-the-hood over time is impressive, especially taking into account the constraints they've had to work within. On a related (though somewhat tangential) note I must say that I think MS tying WinRT (which as I understand it is the clean rewrite of the Windows API) to the Microsoft Store initially was a massive mistake. I still don't have a clear, confident impression of where I can or should use WinRT, even after all these years.