Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows Sandbox

techcommunity.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 328 posts

Re: Windows Sandbox

#211

Post by wongarsu »

Already__Taken wrote: post #136
JaRail wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot (most?) of the hardware Home runs on doesn't support hardware virtualization.

£2,500 Dell XPS ships Home out of the box unless specified otherwise. Windows SKU has nothing to do with hardware. https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/2-in-1-laptops/new-xps-15-2-... Actually I can't seem to configure that directly from dell to come with Pro lol. Seems there's a question about that too.

With Dell you have to buy the business version of a notebook to get Windows Pro. Your example would be [1][2]. Apart from price the main differences are that the business versions ship with Windows Pro and that they have better warranty (next-day onsite).

1: https://www.dell.com/en-uk/work/shop/tablets-and-2-in-1-lapt...

2: https://www.dell.com/en-uk/work/shop/laptops/new-xps-15-2-in...

Re: Windows Sandbox

#212

Post by zozbot123 »

Nition wrote: post #148
createmyaccount wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by blank area?

I don't really know what to call it, although I've seen tech sites call it a "chin". The screen doesn't extend right to the bottom.

The 'chin' on newer Android phones is pretty thin anyway. And with gesture navigation becoming more common (see the newest Pie version, but plenty of OEMs offered gesture navigation before), starting the gesture from the "chin" (outside the touch area) is a nice convenience. The newer iPhones have that horizontal line at the bottom anyway, so it's not even clear what the cleanest design is.

Re: Windows Sandbox

#213

Post by alkonaut »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #201
alkonaut wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course you still have the problem of the software writing files during its operation but that should be limited to $HOME (on POSIX systems) or any path that is writable by the owner / group of the user that application runs as (which should be limited even if it’s a system service). The really tricky problem is when a package must modify an existing shared resource. Such as appending lines to an existing config…

> The really tricky problem is when a package must modify an existing shared resource. Such as appending lines to an existing config for example. Pacman creates a .pacnew file and lets you merge it yourself for this very reason.

Seems like that is offloading the tricky bit to the user rather than solving the tricky problem to be honest.

Re: Windows Sandbox

#214

Post by fetbaffe »

hawski wrote: post #182
pjmlp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what Windows store apps and MSIX sandbox are for.

I'm not much of a Windows user, but MSIX sounds great. Does it add a simple context menu entry to convert an installer? Bonus points for straight up Install and even more for Run. I see it's open source, so if it's missing it may be possible to make a distribution of it with those things implemented. Then one could install it and make it a default msi handler. Edit: from what I see conversion is much more involved. C…

"Being just the start, MSI packages may very well be supported for at least a few more years on Windows 10. However, by looking on the GitHub repo of MSIX, there are some hints that Microsoft envisions a future where MSIX not only replaces the MSI but also creates a package format which cross-platform Microsoft applications can recognize and use on any platform (iOS, Android, MacOS, and Linux)."

https://www.advancedinstaller.com/msix-windows-package.html

Re: Windows Sandbox

#215

Post by humps »

I think enabling this for Windows Home users would potentially turn into a bit of a support nightmare. The requirements for Sandbox include turning virtualization on in BIOS, it also recommends 8GB of RAM and 4 CPU cores with hyperthreading. Correct me if I'm wrong but most consumer laptops and desktops probably don't have a virtualization option in the BIOS and only a small percentage use 4 cores with hyperthreading. So it either won't work for a lot of Home users or even if it did run, performance wouldn't be great.

Re: Windows Sandbox

#217

Post by morrbo »

arkitaip wrote: post #22
chungy wrote: post #5

Sandboxie has been providing similar functionality on versions of Windows since XP: https://www.sandboxie.com/ It's probably nowhere near as elegant as the Windows 10 feature, but it should be very handy if you have older versions of Windows!

Sandboxie is a broken POS. I gave up on it a few months ago after getting tired of having to troubleshoot why another app wasn't working the way it should.

I don't think that's a fair comment to make. It's obviously not broken. I've used it myself to run games downloaded from torrents and it was fine. It also supports office installations and a whole other loaf of stuff. Whilst I agree that the UI isn't the best (at least when I used it) calling it a piece of shit without providing specifics isn't helping anyone

Re: Windows Sandbox

#219

Post by floatboth »

humps wrote: post #215

I think enabling this for Windows Home users would potentially turn into a bit of a support nightmare. The requirements for Sandbox include turning virtualization on in BIOS, it also recommends 8GB of RAM and 4 CPU cores with hyperthreading. Correct me if I'm wrong but most consumer laptops and desktops probably don't have a virtualization option in the BIOS and only a small percentage use 4 cores with hyperthreading…

> most consumer laptops and desktops probably don't have a virtualization option in the BIOS

I haven't seen a single amd64 machine without a virtualization option (except Macs, which don't have a Setup menu in the firmware, but they have virtualization always enabled)

Re: Windows Sandbox

#220

Post by tremon »

kbenson wrote: post #131
finchisko wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is. I'm not talking about app binaries only. But about all files that app creates after install. Most of the reside in home dir, but stays there forever. Like various cache files, settings, ... And most of the time they are not confined to single dir.

> Most of the reside in home dir, but stays there forever. Like various cache files, settings, ... And most of the time they are not confined to single dir. I think you need to support that statement. I believe the vast majority of software on common Unix distros creates no files in $HOME[1], and of those that do the majority use one folder in home[2], which *should+ be used for configuration, and often you don't wan…

He's referring to the XDG standard [0], I think. It used to be that all persistent user-configuration resided in ~/.${appname}, but some people were unhappy with that so they recreated the etc|var|lib|tmp filesystem usage distinction inside users' home directories. This means that an application's user files are now spread across $XDG_DATA_HOME, $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, $XDG_CACHE_HOME and $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.

[0] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-...

Post reply on HN