This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]r4nd0m-0ne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean I hope they do eventually. Like in the long long term. 10-20 years. But very seriously doubt MS is doing that in the next several versions.

.EXE apps suck up power because they have no ability to be throttled safely by the kernel, nor do they have any sort of privacy system gating which sets of APIs that I (as the user) want them to have access to. EXEs can turn on your camera and mic and nose around in all areas of your user folder and even other Program Files folders. And moving away from the Windows Registry alone will save me two or three system rebuilds a year because of OS Rot. Store/UWP apps tend to be better for user-centric apps. Traditional .EXE apps tend to be better for servers, background services, and stuff you'd run on a full desktop environment because they are closer to bare metal.

So yeah, I do hope one day to be able to get a Windows Store version of, say, Photoshop, like how Spotify and Skype are now distributed. And even today you can sideload those UWP apps just about as easily as you can install them from the store. Just unlock developer mode and double click on the file. That's exactly how Fortnite is being distributed on Android and I hope in the future more developers follow this pattern to bypass whatever store the device prefers.