10 ms·
Microsoft is starting to open Windows Update up to any third-party app
- naythaniel 1y ago[dead]
- _Algernon_ 1y agoSuch a forward thinking concept. Wonder when every other OS will follow in their footsteps. Oh wait.
- falcor84 1y agoDoes this mean that now third-party apps will also be allowed to restart "my" computer?
- mihaaly 1y ago[flagged]
- devnullbrain 1y agoNo, it isn't restarted! See, all your browser windows are open and in almost the same place. Context? What's that? It always looked like this. You're crazy.
- blueflow 1y ago30 years late to the party?
- xvilka 1y agoIt makes sense, since exactly the same method is employed by all Linux package managers. The problem with Windows Update though it's too basic compared to other alternatives like Chocolatey, Scoop, or WinGet.
- amlib 1y agoAnd it seems pretty slow. I can't even begin to imagine it needing to update 10x more components and perhaps 10x the amount of data.
- rbanffy 1y agoA key aspect of many Linux package managers such as DNF or APT is that the repository is just a static website. The server doesn't need to compute the delta between where the machine is and where it should be - that's done in the client. That, of course, imposes some limits WRT package visibility and other policies you might want to enforce - you can't easily limit a certain set of users to a subset of your repo.
- WorldMaker 1y agoWindows Update's slowness is a feature more than a bug. The underlying Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) is still such a cool piece of tech even if it has been ages since any web browser let you send low priority downloads to it or an RSS reader was built on top of it. (Both things that existed and were cool, especially in the dialup era where bandwidth was scarce and irregularly connected.) It's designed to prioritize active user needs over pending downloads, throttling itself based on CPU activity and bandwidth usage and download quotas and battery state and expected runtime and now things like estimated energy mixtures (why not download big things when energy is greener?). (It really does download faster when you are not looking, that's what it was designed to do.)
- consumer451 1y agoI am embarrassed about how late I was to learn that WinGet existed. It was only after I came back from years of Ubuntu as a daily driver that I googled "windows package manager" and discovered it.
- guidedlight 1y agoI have always wondered why Windows never had a unified installation, update, and uninstall framework like MacOS had from the start. It seems like an obvious omission that was never solved. Even now corporate customers need to individually package software themselves to manage applications in their fleet. My guess is that Microsoft encouraged applications to share DLLs from the start, and to provide backwards compatibility Microsoft never enforced MSI or a mature software management framework.
- zabzonk 1y agoThe MS software environment is much larger and complex than that of the Mac? So creating tools to manage it is far more difficult?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- chongli 1y agoMac OS hasn't had that from the start. Sure, many apps are installed simply by drag-and-drop to the Applications folder. However, plenty of apps have installers you need to run which usually request administrator credentials to install support files system-wide. Some of these apps have their own updaters which are set to run at startup. In the past, many apps had extensions and control panels they installed into the System Folder which required a reboot. Finally, many of these same apps had no uninstaller. You had to hunt throughout the system to remove all the stuff they installed, including preference files and cache files just in case you wanted to reinstall without having problems down the road.
- flenserboy 1y agoit should have been drag-and-drop only from the start. I'd gladly hop on to a Linux/BSD distro which would be clean & consistent with this.
- ebiester 1y agoWhat if there are setup questions that need to be answered that change the trajectory of an install? For example, some installs will have features you can opt out of to save space.
- znpy 1y agoI often wonder why Microsoft doesn’t go full-apple on its hardware and software. You only get windows laptops and desktop from Microsoft, but they are highly secure (similar to what apple achieves). Everything else needs a windows pro license (with tight checks). I’m fairly sure that would improve windows’ security posture by a huge lot.
- stingraycharles 1y agoI think it’s a matter of competition / market segmentation. People choose Microsoft partially for the reason it doesn’t lock down things as much in their ecosystem as much as Apple does. If they want to compete with Apple using Apple’s strategy, they may face a losing battle.
- nativeit 1y agoI believed that too until I used a Mac for my daily driver. The experience of developing on a machine with native Bash, a relatively mature package handler, and air-tight device integration was MUCH better than Microsoft’s frequently annoying cruft, unexplained crashes, and horrible program management (we won’t call them “packages”, as they tend to leak all over the system with mixed success “uninstalling” them).
- pjerem 1y ago> a relatively mature package handler What package handler ? Installing things on macOS is still a mixed bag of disk images with the app to move yourself, or .pkg files or the App Store. The thing is so broken that brew is the first thing I install on a new Mac.
- znpy 1y ago> What package handler ? they're probably referring to homebrew. which quite honestly, makes MacOS barely bearable. The terminology sucks and the ruby language doesn't help. MacOS without homebrew is unbearable.
- 1y ago
- eviks 1y ago> Microsoft has tried in the past to convince developers to list their apps in the Microsoft Store > Microsoft’s Windows Package Manager has also tried to solve some of the problems with installing and updating apps on Windows Nth time is the charm?
- 0points 1y ago> Microsoft’s Windows Package Manager has also tried to solve some of the problems with installing and updating apps on Windows > but it’s not a widely used way to install and manage apps outside of power users and developers. Nth time of ignoring what's there and instead building another system.
- dinfinity 1y agoI mean, it is not that weird for MS to want to create a first party package manager. They definitely looked at existing stuff like Chocolatey etc. [0] I think it is actually a good move for them to embrace supporting updates for all the non Windows Store stuff in a first party way. There is just way too much software that will never be a Windows Store application. Besides that, more trustworthy checks for malware etc. are included in such a first-party system than in what was already there, simply by having more available infrastructure. It also increases the chances that they can convince developers to move to using install/update libraries that play nice with this official package management tool. At this point in time, I would definitely advise everybody to start out installing most Windows stuff via winget or if it isn't listed there via Chocolatey. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Package_Manager#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Package_Manager#Histor...
- formerly_proven 1y agoWindows/Microsoft Installer packages anyone?
- mihaaly 1y agoThe Çulture of Unfinished Software gets more and more mainstream, with OS level infrastructure and inflated buzzwords' department. Meanwhile, any chance finishing OneDrive file renaming to work without issues finally? Is there an 'update' pending about that? Just a random thing I come accross daily, among the dozens others slowing my work and distracts me on proudly presented OS level. ... or perhaps when I say 'Update and shut down', then actually shutting down in the end instead of restarting and spinning the fans the whole night (me believing the poor thing was shut down as prom... suggested)?
- xnx 1y agoI recently came across Uniget (https://github.com/marticliment/UniGetUI https://github.com/marticliment/UniGetUI) and have been pretty pleased with how it works.
- lousken 1y agoi really hope they dont mess this up, i have been deploying scheduled winget tasks and it works, for the most part
- mrweasel 1y agoDo customers want this? ... not that Microsoft really cares. For home use, I can see this being good as a large segment of users don't stay up to date on security patches, but what about breaking workflows in businesses? Some businesses deliberately do not upgrade some software packages, because it would break stuff. It makes sense to just push all updates in a subscription based economy, but this could also quickly become exactly that: A subscription hell-hole where companies push updates and now you're old licensed copy of Photoshop is converted to Creative Cloud. The idea isn't bad, I just don't trust modern software companies to be able to manage this in a way which makes customers happy.
- NoPicklez 1y agoThis won't be much of an issue for businesses as its understood they do updates differently. If you use a Domain Controller you're likely deploying updates in a staged and controlled way throughout your company.
- shireboy 1y agoI’ve wanted this for a while. I worked on a bank app where the home rolled solution was atrocious. Line of business apps don’t make sense in Microsoft store. But really where I land is to greatly prefer web apps deployed to IaaS because deployment is easier and compatibility is usually a known quantity. Debugging installer or desktop app issues on remote servers and desktops is a hassle I like to avoid if I can
- zeroCalories 1y agoI'm more comfortable the less Microsoft wants to do. Security updates? API changes? Sure. But I was most happy when windows just ran applications and let me drag them around the screen.
- reginald78 1y agoIts bad enough hostile software updates from Microsoft are force bundled with Microsoft security updates. Not sure I want to bundle everyone's else's hostile updates with them as well.
- Hizonner 1y ago[flagged]
- voidUpdate 1y agoyeah, about 71% of desktop users according to statcounter
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoUntil gaming on Linux gets so good that protondb.com becomes a completely unnecessary website, I'll be on Windows. Alternatively, a way to share my GPU between both a Linux host OS and a Windows VM so I could make Linux my daily driver while running games that don't work on Linux in a Windows VM.
- consumer451 1y agoThanks to thoughts provoked by this thread, I just discovered UniGetUI, which is really freakin' cool. This going on any Win box that I control going forward. > The main goal of this project is to create an intuitive GUI for the most common CLI package managers for Windows 10 and 11, such as WinGet, Scoop, Chocolatey, Pip, Npm, .NET Tool, PowerShell Gallery and more (Check out the package manager compatibility table)!. With this app, you can easily download, install, update, and uninstall any software published on the supported package managers — and much more! https://github.com/marticliment/UniGetUI https://github.com/marticliment/UniGetUI - 16.2k stars
- herf 1y agoWindows still has a situation where Chrome's updates use a special service to dodge around escalation issues, and Spotify and many others install in AppData for the same reason, and lots of uninstallers just don't work, leaving files and other things behind. MSI has required "chained signing" using an old key to sign the new one forever, but when you're maintaining updates over a decade that isn't very easy to do. I hope they can clean it all up!
- twosdai 1y agoFor the leaving files around case, isn't that an impossible thing to really deal with from the installer stand point for non containerized applications that have root/admin access? Because they can just create and write to random directories whenever they want. And any Uninstaller, either provided by the app or Microsoft could just miss these files, because they aren't recreating the full program control flow.
- contextfree 1y agoYes. UWP/MSIX+AppContainer addressed this, but inherently impose limitations on what the app and installer can do.
- JackSlateur 1y agoThis is why we invented distributions (Linux and friends): one package manager, common practices and shared code, to avoid everybody doing its own (sometime broken) thing
- ThunderSizzle 1y agoAnd now we also have flatpak, snap, etc. on top ofnthe "one package manager"
- eviks 1y agoWhy is it impossible if you can track where they write during the installation process? There are even apps that do that. For apps that run as admin that's harder indeed, but at least for the installation process the good-but-not-perfect design could still be added?
- GuestFAUniverse 1y agoBetter late, than never I guess. I hope all the (crappy) update services disappear. Doesn't make sense to have a centrally managed update where one can pause as necessary, just to get interrupted by an anachronistic design.
- blibble 1y agoI guess this means 7zip updates will now take 20 minutes and the require the computer to be restarted?
- TheAmazingRace 1y agoNot necessarily. Plenty of updates pushed by Windows Update don't require one. 7zip could easily be configured to behave that way.
- archerx 1y agoI have windows 10 updates disabled on all of my machines. Haven’t updated in at least a year and it has been smooth sailing. Microsoft has ruined the word “update” and turned it into a dirty word. I don’t understand why Nadella hates windows so much.
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoI imagine there are some people clutching their pearls over not installing updates to Windows due to security concerns. But for most home users, it's not a big deal. I imagine 99% of home users are behind a NAT, and being behind NAT means external attackers aren't going to be able to connect to your machine and run remote exploits (ie, EternalBlue). The only way to get compromised is to get trojaned, in which case a Windows update wasn't going to save you anyways. At best, it means a trojan might have a slightly harder time escalating to Admin/SYSTEM without getting caught, but a trojan doesn't need Administrator permissions to ransomware your Documents folder or add your machine to a botnet. As long as your browser is up to date, you'll be fine.
- archerx 1y agoExactly. I don’t even have an anti virus and completely disabled windows defender because it was so annoying and everything just runs great. Also I’m using LTSC.
- npteljes 1y agoUnfortunately this is just anecdotal. I also did many things in my life that were risky, and I got away with them every single time. This doesn't prove that they were not risky, or that my results are reproducible. That said, I also hate Windows updates, and especially the way Windows handles them. LTSC is also my way to avoid some of it, especially the ""feature"" updates. LTSC is something I also recommend, if people can manage an activation server, or I can point them to mine.
- archerx 1y ago
- 1970-01-01 1y agoBad idea. It will create a massive single point of failure whenever the Windows Update service breaks, which it has a very long history of doing: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Windows%20update%20not%20working&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Windows%...
- NoPicklez 1y agoThat's if it becomes the single point to update, which it won't be, it won't become the only way to update applications
- mrkramer 1y agoGates is opening gates of hell.
- jollyllama 1y agoWould this offer any mitigation against Crowdstrike type-scenarios? Like, would it make rolling back broken kernel badness easier?
- NoPicklez 1y agoI don't think so, all this would do is push through the update through a central place. If the update is bad and causes a Kernel panic it will still to do regardless of where the update is coming from. Microsoft isn't going to test any of the updates themselves before it sends them through the central update feature
- jollyllama 1y agoSure, but don't windows updates have some kind of associated system recovery integration, such that you could boot to recovery and restore to a pre-update backup?
- hulitu 1y agoI think the Antivirus is special.
- pentagrama 1y agoFor non developers/advanced users that can use Winget/CL to update apps, I recommend the open source app UniGetUI [1], is actively maintained, it has a nice UI and works like a charm. [1] https://github.com/marticliment/UniGetUI https://github.com/marticliment/UniGetUI
- WalterSobchak 1y agoThis is really slick. I wasn't aware of this project so thanks for sharing!
- dabockster 1y agoIt’s nice, but it’s also one of those infamous one person OSS projects. Don’t use it in an IT environment if you can help it. And if you can donate money to this person at all, do it.
- mike_hearn 1y agoBit of a strange announcement. This already happened a long time ago. The MSIX engine that they mention uses a lot of the same technology as Windows Update and thus has many of the same features. I suspect what they mean is adding some more APIs to try and help non-Chrome non-MSIX apps benefit from those. MSIX is an interesting beast. My company sells a tool called Conveyor [1] that can create these packages from any platform including macOS and Linux given a simple config file for apps using runtimes like Electron, Flutter or the JVM (it's free for open source projects). We do a lot of work to make MSIX work better and be easier to use, because out of the box it's quite raw and in particular there are a lot of bugs in Windows 10 that Microsoft never fix because they view it as EOL. Conveyor creates a tiny 500kb installer EXE that drives the MSIX package manager API to do the install whilst working around these bugs. Amongst other things, MSIX gives you: • Chrome-style silent background updates on a regular schedule, even if the app isn't running. • Incremental block-based delta updates. • Incremental block-based downloads and installs, i.e. Windows can re-use parts of one app to install another, based on file block hashes. Makes installs very fast when they share a common runtime! • And those installs/updates can pull blocks from other machines on the LAN too! • Declarative installs and OS-controlled uninstalls. Writes to the user's AppData directory are virtualized, so uninstalls can be clean. • Packages can be installed without admin rights, without dumping stuff in the user's home directory. Windows runs an elevated service that does the install for you. • You can sandbox apps if they're shipped with MSIX. • EXEs can be automatically added to the user's path, without needing any terminals or shells to be restarted. MacOS can't do that! • Windows admins can easily deploy and manage them. • They're cryptographically signed and their integrity is protected by the OS, so malware can't fiddle with the binaries (unless it manages to elevate to root). • Although you can't create them with a regular zip tool, you can extract them with one. Conveyor adds some other features on top like the ability to have web-style "update immediately on launch" updates, and a simple Electron/JVM control API so you can force updates on users. It's a pretty nice feature set overall and has some big advantages over Squirrel, which is what Electron uses. However, I would definitely NOT recommend you try and work with MSIX directly. Microsoft's tooling is quite awkward, and their policy of only supporting fully up to date Win11 machines - and only from Windows - means you can't realistically distribute apps using MSIX unless you go via an intermediary like Conveyor that's committed to making it work. You'll just hit lots of weird bugs and installs that fail for no obvious reason with mysterious error codes. We ploughed through the pain so you don't have to. [1] https://hydraulic.dev/ https://hydraulic.dev/
- aceazzameen 1y agoPlease no. They'll eventually use some dark pattern to force an update on software that I don't want. MS can't be trusted.
- absurdo 1y agoLike other posters I feel this change is way behind the curve, but not because others did it already and long ago; rather, because as a dyed in the wool Win32 API/Petzold Acolyte, the age of desktop apps ended at least a decade ago in my mind. The rare app here or there that people have installed is eclipsed by phone apps and the browser. In my case I tend to by far have utilities installed moreso than any other kind of program, but that’s not a valid business case for MSFT. So who is their target audience?
- hulitu 1y ago> The rare app here or there that people have installed is eclipsed by phone apps and the browser In Enterprise this is seldom the case. I agree that some CAD vendors left their brain at the entrance and are using Web toolkits for programs (because who needs memory and speed for computations, when you can allocate it for UI), but this is mostly seldom at the moment.
- b0dhimind 1y agoFound UniGetUI and it does a great job calling WinGet, Scoop, and a buncha others with an ignore list as well! Windows will never have that level of customizability.
- deafpolygon 1y agoGiven that it's Microsoft, I'm betting the farm that this is only happening because they want more granular control and visibility over who has what installed.