What the Windows Platform needs

Published on July 28th, 2006 in Windows, Windows Installer

Having worked as a system engineer for the Windows platform for a few years, a few ideas recently came up my mind on what Microsoft should do to make Windows a better platform.

As I started to use Linux as my main platform about a year ago (I still use Windows for some tasks, but inside a virtual machine), I quickly got accustomed to package managers. All Linux distributions these days come with a package manager, either they’re GUI or shell-based. Of course, this is due to the nature of Linux. Since most of the software users will use on their Linux box is open-source, it is possible to create very distribution-specific packages with insane modifications to them (you can compile a package to run optimized for 686 architecture and Java support for example). If that application is not open-source, then the binary is being downloaded and installed. That is the biggest advantage Linux has (and UNIX in general) compared to other operating systems in my opinion. It lets you search a central repository for a specific application by name or description letting you find and install the right application for your needs almost instantly. Does Windows have that? No! MacOS X does support this to some extent thanks to its FreeBSD roots (take a look at portage, the Gentoo package manager for MacOS X here). Installing an application just seems like an integrated part of the operating system. Updates are also a snap. Gentoo users for example, can easily update their running Linux operating system and all of its applications their dependencies with only a single command: “emerge -u world”. It’s easy as that. How long would it take to update all software applications on your Windows box? Take a guess.

So what can Microsoft do about this? Since Windows is not mainly a platform for open-source software, it could extend its software manager application by allowing users to browse a repository of applications by certified Microsoft partners such as Adobe, Symantec and many other quality Software vendors. It could offer certification for shareware authors and freeware apps making sure they don’t harm the operating system and providing its users with good software almost out of the box.

By making sure every application used the excellent Windows Installer Technology (.msi installer packages), it would drastically improve the performance and reliability of its operating system, since MSI packages are the only ones who really get cleanly removed and also solve dependency problems automagically. As I see it (among many others), the number one reason for Windows installations becoming corrupted, are users who download & install numerous “suspicious” free & shareware applications which contain malware. If they could download and install applications for all their needs from one, central and secure repository, it would minimize that threat to a minimum. At the same time, it would allow end-users with very basic knowledge to install software a lot easier and thus make their offering a lot user-friendlier.

What do you think? Do you have any other suggestions on how to improve Windows, or another operating system? I’d love to hear them.

Here’s a screenshot of Portage the Gentoo Linux package manager compiling and installing the latest verstion of Apache.

Here’s a picture of Synaptic, a GUI front-end for the apt package manager. It’s being used in Ubuntu and many others.

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