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Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

devblogs.microsoft.com

131–140 of 556 posts

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#131
Honest question, how come I can install Steam, Signal, Teams and other "modern" apps on linux without the same issues that Microsoft Windows has?

I know RPMs and DEBs follow a fairly strict patter, in that they keep track of everything installed so it can easily be cleaned up. Why can't Microsoft launch its own set of standards that achieve the same goal?

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#132
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel gated at all by my linux installation. If I want I can customize everything, but at least I don't have to deal with a thousand installers and update processes on a day by day basis.

I love dnf and apt, but I dread attempting to uninstall anything using them.

I am using pacman since over 10 years, only used apt and dnf for a couple of weeks.

Yes, also on servers I run arch... let's me sleep better :)

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#133

Honest question, how come I can install Steam, Signal, Teams and other "modern" apps on linux without the same issues that Microsoft Windows has? I know RPMs and DEBs follow a fairly strict patter, in that they keep track of everything installed so it can easily be cleaned up. Why can't Microsoft launch its own set of standards that achieve the same goal?

[deleted]

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#135
post #122

Microsoft makes Explorer an integral, unremovable, ever-present part of Windows. Raymond Chen gets very upset when people modify it. Smells of hypocrisy to me. Let go of the de-facto Explorer monopoly and you won't have to deal with these types of problems.

This is just a report of terrible and broken hacks, not hypocrisy.

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#137
post #94

Software shouldn't uninstall or update itself. There should be a package manager to do this. Then at least you have one attack vector less per application.

I think package managers are the single most impressive feature Linux distros have over Windows. Everything else I use has some kind of equivalent; for a dev environment you can sort of get by with MinGW and MSYS. But if there's anything on Windows remotely as capable as apt or pacman, I haven't heard of it.

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#139
post #31

Imagine knowing where each file in the system comes from. Imagine having a package system, instead of that crap.

Imagine having 2,000 different config file formats you have to edit within a terminal instead of a central registry hive. Imagine a file explorer that doesn't simply prompt for admin rights when you need them, instead silently failing.

Imagine having a central registry hive, yet have programs do whatever they want, including saving config files in random locations and formats.

Imagine using a file explorer you don't like.

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never a security flaw that a program running with administrator privileges is allowed to do something.

It's a security flaw that too many programs have too many privileges. Windows should have pervasive fine grained permissions like any other modern OS.

Windows pervasive fine grained permissions is better than UNIX, it goes all the way down to OS resources.

The OS isn't to blame when people give root access left and right.

Actually this is why macOS got SIP.

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