Comment by nalekberov
3 days ago
Seriously who needs a Store App on a desktop OS? The process should be as simple as visiting app’s website, optionally paying, and installing. No middle man, hence less point of breakage.
3 days ago
Seriously who needs a Store App on a desktop OS? The process should be as simple as visiting app’s website, optionally paying, and installing. No middle man, hence less point of breakage.
Well, the rest of the world (outside of MacOS and Windows) settled on repositories and package managers, with hash verification, versioning, updating/installing/uninstalling with composable commands (that can also be used via GUIs), etc.
Use Fedora for half a year and tell me what you prefer.
Those are only tolerable because: They are free, optional, operated by people who have no incentive to be the slightest bit anti-user, and you are never actually limited to them so you can take the convenience because you still get the options and control when you do need it.
Produce the `./configure && make install` for Office and you would have a point.
MacOS and Windows, as far as I understand, do the equivalent of "build for the target OS/arch and include DLLs for all transitive dependencies except the system ones." MacOS puts all that in a disk image while Windows I don't know puts it in one or several directories.
I like the "one consistent system with one dependency tree" policy of Debian et al, but with flatpack, appimage, snap, etc. the "application" part of software might prefer the Windows/MacOS model.
I use package manager too regardless of OS, but after all Microsoft Store isn’t for tech-savvy people, right?
There are UI frontends for package managers, like KDE Discover
And yet none of those "outsiders" have figured out a way to economically renumerate developers for their work. Flathub had a initiative a few years ago to add payments to help developers fund their projects, but I haven't seen anything come out of it.
Most linux distros require that software they distribute is open source, and link to the home pages of applications, so effectively donations are the only way to pay for those. There are paid distros (which are almost always about support, there was a paid GNUStep distro though many years ago).
On the other hand, Steam et al are app stores where developers can get paid.
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I'm not sure what you're talking about. I can download Blender from almost any package manager, and the devs of Blender are paid.
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>Use Fedora for half a year and tell me what you prefer.
I prefer good high-dpi support, Wifi and Bluetooth that works, usability, developers getting rewarded for their hard work, etc.
I'm legitimately not sure what you're saying. Are you saying Linux, Windows, or MacOS? Because as far as Bt and Wifi go, usability, rewarding developers, that applies to Linux and MacOS and ... not Windows whatsoever. I'm not sure about High DPI support, probably sucks on X11, maybe on Wayland, so I'm guessing you mean Windows?
FYI I develop software for Linux in my free time, I don't get paid and I feel pretty rewarded.
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Steam exists, and provides features desired by both users and developers.
I'm not sure getting software directly from developers is less likely to break than getting it through a store. The store may do QA to ensure that broken apps cannot be uploaded, developers may vanish and hence absent someone else being able to maintain it the app will eventually break, and how are security issues handled?
If Steam decides to suspend your account, you have 0 game in your hand.
But I agree, sometimes central place to get your software might be more reliable.
When buying software I mostly trust Apple over a random software developer.
>No middle man
There usually is, very few software companies handle card transactions themselves. They usually farm it out to someone like Digital River (who aren't very trustworthy).
I always thought Microsoft had seen how much money Google and Apple were making with their app stores and decided they wanted some of that pie...
Who needs it? Microsoft. They want to have something like iOS App Store and Android Play Store, there's a lot of money there
> Seriously who needs a Store App on a desktop OS?
I like the idea. A single place to search for common apps, that also keep them updated. I don't want to download the .exe again and again with ever update. Just do that in the background please.
Though I mostly use WinGet, but it's sadly not as user friendly as apt.