Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

mundane gripe: Uninstalling an apt package is too complicated and it is beyond me why it isn't a single command in 2023. I have to skim stackoverflow answers every time I need to do it (multiple times a year).

The system is great, in theory. In practice adoption has been held back by the fact that it was originally only for UWP apps which almost nobody writes, and also only for the MS Store. These days you can use it for Win32 apps outside the store but then you will hit bugs in Windows. And packages must be signed.

Still, the feature set is pretty great if you can make it work. For example you can get Chrome-style updates where Windows will keep the app fresh in the background even if it's not running. And it will share files on disk between apps if they're the same, avoid downloading them, do delta updates and more. It also tracks all the files your app writes to disk outside of the user's home directory so they can be cleanly uninstalled, without needing any custom uninstaller logic.

One interesting aspect of the format is that because it's a "special" (read: weird) kind of zip, you can make them on non-Windows platforms. Not using any normal zip tool of course, oh no, that would be too easy. You can only extract them using normal zip tools. But if you write your own zip library you can create them.

A couple of years ago I sat down to write a tool that would let anyone ship apps to Win/Mac/Linux in one command from whatever OS they liked, no harder than copying a website to a server. I learned about MSIX and decided to make this package format. It took us a while to work around all the weird bugs in Windows that only show up on some machines and not others for no explicable reason, but it's stable now and it works pretty well. For example you can take some HTML and JS files, write a 5 line config file pointing at those files, run one command and now you have a download page pointing to fully signed (or self signed) self-updating Windows, Mac and Linux Electron app. Or a JVM app. Or a Flutter app. Or any kind of app, really! Also IT departments love it because, well, it's a real package format and not an installer.

Writing more about this tech has been on my todo list for a while, but I have now published something about the delta update scheme it uses which is based on block maps, it's somewhat unusual (a bit Flatpak like):

https://hydraulic.dev/blog/20-deltas-diffed.html

The tool is free to download, and free for open source projects if anyone is wanting to ship stuff to Windows without installers:

https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/

Wondering what would it take to port mshta (with all the ActiveX goodies) to other platforms. Maybe it's a little bit late for that, but sounds like it might be a fun project to me.

It allows for a variety of installers to exist with different features for different use cases.

It allows you to install the application in any location you choose.

It allows for portable installations and to run software just copied from other sources.