271–280 of 328 posts
I wish they would have added the option to have the data persist. I have a bunch of software that I run only a few times per year, but I don't want to go through the hassle of re-installing it every time I need to run it. It would have been so much more useful if the data could persist.
Wouldn't that make it an ordinary VM?
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> Nowadays it's almost impossible to uninstall an app completely, because most of them creating files willy nilly. This has always been the case on Windows. In fact if anything, nowadays it’s better than its ever been because thanks to the UAC and other controls Microsoft have put in place, developers aren’t so free to do whatever they like to the host machine. But that’s remember a time before the UAC when it would…
One trick I use when trying to see where in $HOME a program creates files is to create a new user with an empty $HOME, run the program and then see what files were created. If it's a GUI program, give it permission to run from your regular user with xhost so you don't need to login through the desktop manager.
I actually always run that way most applications that do not fully adhere to the XDG base dir specification.
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!
Apparently you've to uninstall Sandboxie for this update: https://i.imgur.com/oVKzdq0.png
Please do not make this a Pro / Enterprise feature. I do remote tech support for my parents and would love for them to browse / use apps in a sandbox.
Think of it like giving your parent's a $100 present for Christmas, an upgrade from Win Home to Win Pro and your life will be so much easier.
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I believe it's because the virtualization support is only limited to those versions. I might be wrong though.
Isn’t this basically a virtual machine, though? I don’t see anything special that you’d need a more expensive version of Windows for. This should be using your processor’s virtualization capabilities, right?
- "One of the key enhancements we have made for Windows Sandbox is the ability to use a copy of the Windows 10 installed on your computer, instead of downloading a new VHD image as you would have to do with an ordinary virtual machine." - "we also allow Windows sandbox to use the same physical memory pages as the host for operating system binaries via a technology we refer to as “direct map”" - "More recently, Microsoft has worked with our graphics ecosystem partners to integrate modern graphics virtualization capabilities directly into DirectX and WDDM, the driver model used by display drivers on Windows." (Note: it also works with OpenGL nowadays too)
Maybe you can achieve your workflow needs from Home + free 3rd party virtualization software but if you don't see anything special I'd recommend reading the article more carefully.
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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.advancedi…
This sounds like someone making installer stuff would say. MSI will be supported on modern OSes for much longer than "a few more years".
VB6 apps created in 1998 will be supported until 2025 at least. MSIs will be treated the same.
Nowadays it's almost impossible to uninstall an app completely, because most of them creating files willy nilly. And it's same on all known OSes. The side effect we see is system size growing in time. IMO running an app in a sandbox should be the default option. On Windows, I used to like sandboxie, which virtualized every write into single directory. Uninstall was easy as removing that dir. This MS sandbox doesn't a…
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> Got any examples of that? Not the person you were talking to, but looking at certbot, it puts files into /lib/systemd/system/ and /etc/cron.d/ with root:root.
Thank you. I've not used certbot so excuse the dumb question, but is certbot doing that during install (ie via the package manager) or during program execution (ie when the certbot ELF is launched)? I shouldn't expect too much in /lib/systemd/system is installed outside of package managers but I agree it does happen and at least they're generally quite easy to identify which service file does what. crontab is definit…
dpkg -L helps a lot when figuring out where all the files get spread.
This is pretty cool, I know where I'm going to run my browser from now on :-).
In case that wasn’t sarcasm: you probably don’t want to run your browser in this, since it already has a sandbox and you’ll have a measurable performance penalty by running in a virtual machine.