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This also affects freeware / shareware / people who want to avoid "store" monopolies and their associated tax. This also affects people who are used to download
by temac 7y ago
This also affects freeware / shareware / people who want to avoid "store" monopolies and their associated tax. This also affects people who are used to download binaries from reputable sites, because Google did not manage to understand correctly what is reputable or not (and honestly trying to automate everything in this area is a recipe for disasters)
- bshacklett 7y agoOne alternative is a package manager like https://scoop.sh/ https://scoop.sh/. It's built-in repositories are vetted/curated, free to publish on and simple to install/use. There is the downside that it's a cli-based app, but that's easily overcome with a GUI frontend add-on. One of my favorite parts of it's architecture is that it's got a mechanism for adding third party repositories (buckets), so while the publishing policy for the main bucket is mostly limited to development tools, it wouldn't be hard for the community to build a new bucket for independent software developers to use as a general distribution mechanism.
- tytso 7y agoSo if Google can't understand what is reputable site or not, how do you expect the average user to figure it out? I tell my parents they should never-never-never download random binaries from a web site. The last time my Dad did it, his Windows machine got completely p0wned, and I had to completely reinstall it from scratch. And freeware/shareware have no tax on most stores, since 30% of zero is still zero.