Re: Microsoft Still Trying To Turn Dimdows Into Linux

On Wed, 5/28/2025 7:46 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

Microsoft is definitely suffering from Linux-envy. There are many
parts to this envy, of course: one of them is package-manager-envy.
Microsoft would dearly love for Windows to have a common architecture
for installing and updating add-on packages, like most Linux distros
do.
 
But there are lots of obstacles to this in the proprietary-software
world, not least of which is that the major proprietary-software
developers would never agree to it, because they see it as a loss of
control over their own Intellectual Property.
 
<https://www.theverge.com/news/675446/microsoft-windows-update-all-apps-orchestration-platform>
 

This kind of maintenance was already being done on Windows.

   [Picture]

    https://i.postimg.cc/sfYB93F9/Reliability-Monitor-W11.gif

The OS Metro.Apps get updated, when an update is available.
The execution time of that, does not easily look like it correlates
with Windows Update, but we don't know what the polling frequency
is underneath.

If you examine the log, you can find one of those failing to update,
until eventually they figure it out and it updates. Normally,
the users are unaware of that activity, and whatever is happening
in there is not a cause for concern.

Windows Update is different, in that a broken update can interfere
with other updates executing in a timely fashion. And Microsoft
does not particularly care that a machine has stopped updating.
We stare at the Windows Update, if we seek health signs saying
everything is running normally in there.

My Win10 install, has Visual Studio, and recently three updates
launched from Windows Update, and they promptly died on an error.
Since it looked like other updates could get blocked by that,
I had to fix it. After a Repair Install, it's all working again.
Does Linux have a Repair Install, where your programs and data
files are untouched, while the OS automatically refreshes ?

If a Windows repair recipe is too complicated, at least some
scenarios can be fixed by a Repair Install.

   Paul