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Justification by faith in Microsoft. Really? The MSI/MSIX kerfuffle


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6 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I have no troubles like that with the Affinity 2 apps on my Windows 11 desktop or Windows 10 laptop machines. The apps operate for me just as they did when they were installed the old way.

Sure, the application UI itself operates in the same way when you're using the app regardless of installation method. 

It doesn't launch or integrate with the OS and other applications in the same way at all, however. This is the cause of all the complaints.

You asked what the lock-in was and I answered: it's a lock-in to a restricted operating environment and usage metaphor that doesn't suit the majority of Windows desktop users. 

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2 hours ago, rvst said:

As a Macintosh user Walt

Last I checked Walt was a Windows user.

 

2 hours ago, rvst said:

you probably don't appreciate the extent to which the App architecture is a poor fit to a desktop environment

The Mac has a desktop environment and using apps has never been an issue.  The Mac is far more app-centric than Windows is, and has been since before macOS X, much less the sandbox or the App Store.

 

2 hours ago, rvst said:

This is a tile-based interface designed principally for tablets

 

I found this to be a particularly curious statement.  Have you even tried it?  I don't really trust Windows for anything I really care about, but I do have a Windows 11 ARM install under a virtual machine on my Mac Studio, so with the universal license having already been paid (for my Mac and iPad versions), I went ahead and downloaded the MSIX installers and installed the Windows versions onto my Windows 11 VM.  No issues with installation, and they look like practically every other app on the Windows system in terms of how they are launched, with icons in the task bar and the start menu.

 

2 hours ago, rvst said:

Because of the sandboxing, integrations are very difficult. It is designed to isolate software packages from each other, not facilitate integration.

When I started each of the apps after authorizing the license, it popped open the window to download content from the Affinity Store.  I started installing things in one of the apps, and the others all showed the progress of the download/install of those items - in perfect sync with each other.  If the apps which are sandboxed can communicate that effectively with each other, why do you think they would have difficulty communicating with other apps which are not sandboxed?

To help check this, I installed the Windows version of RawTherapee and set the Affinity Photo 2 .exe alias as the external editor in its preferences.  I then opened an image and clicked the button to edit in an external editor - the image opened in Affinity Photo 2 without complaint.

The sandbox is designed to control communication between apps, not to prevent it completely.

 

3 hours ago, rvst said:

It gives the user no control of where the software is installed.

It appears that you can move it to a different drive after it is installed, however, as others have pointed out.

 

3 hours ago, rvst said:

So the choice of a MSIX installer locks the user into a very restricted environment and usage metaphor ill-adapted to a desktop workflow

I see no evidence of this whatsoever.

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5 hours ago, fde101 said:

Last I checked Walt was a Windows user.

Ah, perhaps he is. I just saw a very recent post of his where he replied with a screenshot done on a Mac and thus made an assumption

5 hours ago, fde101 said:

I found this to be a particularly curious statement.  Have you even tried it?  I don't really trust Windows for anything I really care about, but I do have a Windows 11 ARM install under a virtual machine on my Mac Studio, so with the universal license having already been paid (for my Mac and iPad versions), I went ahead and downloaded the MSIX installers and installed the Windows versions onto my Windows 11 VM.  No issues with installation, and they look like practically every other app on the Windows system in terms of how they are launched, with icons in the task bar and the start menu.

I'm not talking about Affinity's interface at all as it pertains to that remark. I'm instead referring to how Windows skins the desktop shell so that even the Start menu now has these huge tiles and most of the system apps have been moved to the app sandbox. Many of us replace the horrendous Windows 10 Start menu with an alternative one. Personally, I use Stardock.

5 hours ago, fde101 said:

When I started each of the apps after authorizing the license, it popped open the window to download content from the Affinity Store.  I started installing things in one of the apps, and the others all showed the progress of the download/install of those items - in perfect sync with each other.  If the apps which are sandboxed can communicate that effectively with each other, why do you think they would have difficulty communicating with other apps which are not sandboxed?

There are numerous complaints and bug reports in the various threads on integration with other software. This is surely "difficulty communicating with other apps which are not sandboxed", right?

5 hours ago, fde101 said:

The sandbox is designed to control communication between apps, not to prevent it completely.

Indeed, if implemented properly. But it wasn't implemented properly and so it is preventing communication in some cases. This sandboxed architecture introduces more points of failure. It might reduce installation issues somewhat (although not convincingly so from the many installation errors others have reported here), but it does so at the cost of increased integration problems.

5 hours ago, fde101 said:

It appears that you can move it to a different drive after it is installed, however, as others have pointed out.

Partial control. And a read of the many rants in the forum threads highlights that this doesn't work for a significant number of users

5 hours ago, fde101 said:

I see no evidence of this whatsoever.

This may well just be down to our different usage styles. Without making any assumptions about your own usage style, I'm a software engineer, and so my systems are high-end, heavily customised and optimised and I write a lot of scripts to do repetitive tasks. I use Windows Professional and the Group Policy Editor to tweak a lot of the functionality of Windows and also disable the Windows App Store, as do other users of Affinity as some have noted here. I value a desktop system where I have the control and I can tweak things and set them up as I please rather than submitting to the software publisher's idea of how I should do things. I have sufficient knowledge and skill to secure my system myself without needing to submit to Microsoft's sandbox (I always run only as a standard user and not as an Administrator)

Perhaps a good illustration of this is to note also that I'm an Android user and not an iPhone user for exactly this reason. It gives me the ability to customise my interface and tweak many things, whereas the iPhone is a lot more prescriptive about how things look and are done. On Android, I can literally replace the entire interface with a custom one, which I do - I'm a Nova Launcher person. 

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1 hour ago, rvst said:

with a screenshot done on a Mac

It could have been from an iPad, but the only way I'd get a Mac screenshot is quoting it from someone else's post :) 

 

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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19 hours ago, rvst said:

MSIX installers are part of the App architecture. This is a tile-based interface designed principally for tablets - big ass tiles on a touch screen. It maps very poorly onto a multi-monitor desktop setup.

This is not true. You're conflating two different technologies here, MSIX (a packaging / installation technology, nothing to do with design or UI frameworks, or tiles or tablets, or touch screens etc) with UWP. The latter was their failed attempt at a new design metaphor and UI framework.

 

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39 minutes ago, Mark Ingram said:

This is not true. You're conflating two different technologies here, MSIX (a packaging / installation technology, nothing to do with design or UI frameworks, or tiles or tablets, or touch screens etc) with UWP. The latter was their failed attempt at a new design metaphor and UI framework.

 

No, UWP is the precursor to the MSIX approach... some just remember it as having bad UI because everything new from Microsoft also has a new and bad UI.

https://www.pcgamer.com/tim-sweeney-microsoft-uwp-is-still-woefully-inadequate/

 

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12 minutes ago, deeds said:

No, UWP is the precursor to the MSIX approach

Wrong, and if that article tries to imply that (which I did not see in a quick skimming) then the game developer in question (or some editing of his comments) is also wrong.

MSIX supports apps using UWP, but does not require it.  Arbitrary Windows apps can be packaged using MSIX, which can be seen from the fact that various other package formats, including MSI, can be converted to MSIX using a tool that Microsoft provides:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/packaging-tool/create-app-package

You might note that the page describing the conversion makes no indication of required API or framework use on the part of the application, except for a comment about installing the .net if the application requires it.

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2 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Wrong, and if that article tries to imply that (which I did not see in a quick skimming) then the game developer in question (or some editing of his comments) is also wrong.

MSIX supports apps using UWP, but does not require it.  Arbitrary Windows apps can be packaged using MSIX, which can be seen from the fact that various other package formats, including MSI, can be converted to MSIX using a tool that Microsoft provides:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/packaging-tool/create-app-package

You might note that the page describing the conversion makes no indication of required API or framework use on the part of the application, except for a comment about installing the .net if the application requires it.

You really have to get a feel for how Microsoft operations are planned and executed over generations to have any kind of feel for what the OP is on about. That kind of wide context, and insightfulness is difficult. It's not expected of you.

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2 hours ago, deeds said:

No, UWP is the precursor to the MSIX approach... some just remember it as having bad UI because everything new from Microsoft also has a new and bad UI.

https://www.pcgamer.com/tim-sweeney-microsoft-uwp-is-still-woefully-inadequate/

 

I really don't understand how you are arguing about this. You're talking about a UI framework and an installer. UWP is not a precursor to MSIX. They are completely unrelated technologies. You can continue to repeat yourself but that does not make what you're saying true. 

MSIX can be used to install Win32, WPF, WinUI, or UWP apps. Your argument is equivalent to saying "MSIX is a precursor to Win32". 

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2 hours ago, Mark Ingram said:

This is not true. You're conflating two different technologies here, MSIX (a packaging / installation technology, nothing to do with design or UI frameworks, or tiles or tablets, or touch screens etc) with UWP. The latter was their failed attempt at a new design metaphor and UI framework.

 

Yes, technically you're correct that they're separate technologies that don't require concomitant usage.

I have a tendency to conflate them in my own mind as being in that group of "failed things that Microsoft has tried unsuccessfully to impose on users",  since they're both comparatively recent technologies introduced by Microsoft that users loathe. 

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15 minutes ago, Mark Ingram said:

MSIX can be used to install Win32, WPF, WinUI, or UWP apps. Your argument is equivalent to saying "MSIX is a precursor to Win32". 

The crucial word here is "can", but is not just that, is it? Just as UWP was most definitely not just a new design metaphor and UI framework, as you first claimed.

It's also a means of isolating/removing the choice mechanisms that users have come to know and love about their usage of Windows, to begin gathering both types of users (end users and app makers) into a process that's much more akin to the direction of Apple's App Store on iOS. ie even less free than that of the Mac App Store. This is what Tim Sweeney has most clearly identified and explained, as have many others.

Note, your company is unable to identify ownership from either of these platforms' stores. Is it really a wise idea to be having anything to do with them if they're not permitting direct, identifiable relationships with your customers?

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3 minutes ago, deeds said:

It's also a means of isolating/removing the choice mechanisms that users have come to know and love about their usage of Windows

I've been involved in discussions with Microsoft since the inception of this, and I can tell you that their intentions are to increase the stability of Windows and improve the experience of end users. There is no maligned conspiracy to "take away control". They want a nice isolated experience for application developers so that they can guarantee their applications won't be affected by other third parties (which we have seen in v1).  That does simplify things, which some users may not be happy with, but generally people just want their applications and their machine to just work

5 minutes ago, deeds said:

This is what Tim Sweeney has most clearly identified and explained, as have many others.

Tim Sweeney is great, but he is also in the business of running an App Store, so he's hardly unbiased here.

6 minutes ago, deeds said:

Note, your company is unable to identify ownership from either of these platforms' stores. Is it really a wise idea to be having anything to do with them if they're not permitting direct, identifiable relationships with your customers?

I fully support the idea that third parties don't share customer data with us. Privacy is important. We allow customers to purchase from Apple or Microsoft because those users trust them with the personal details and their credit card details. You may not like those companies, but that doesn't mean that all of our customers feel the same way.

----

And with that final point, I would like to say, these forums are not representative of our overall customer base. The forums are a location that people come to when they have problems, or when they want to be actively involved in feature discussions or partake in the beta tests. They are not the place where our average user goes to say "Everything was fine, thanks.". I feel like a lot of discussions here are skewed by the belief that some percentage of users on the forum represent the overall feeling of our customers. 

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2 minutes ago, Mark Ingram said:

I feel like a lot of discussions here are skewed by the belief that some percentage of users on the forum represent the overall feeling of our customers. 

those users are right here, articulating their thoughts and feelings and experiences. Instead of parroting this canard, you can, quite literally, just ask them what they think, feel and have experienced.

3 minutes ago, Mark Ingram said:

Tim Sweeney is great, but he is also in the business of running an App Store, so he's hardly unbiased here.

At the time of his initial commentaries on UWP and the obvious directions of Windows, he did not have a store, nor have one planned. It was, in fact, a response to these issues becoming universal... by the fact that UWP closed the loop... it meant that all OS vendors were now attempting the same thing.

 

4 minutes ago, Mark Ingram said:

and I can tell you that their intentions are to increase the stability of Windows and improve the experience of end users

When has Microsoft not had good intentions (road paved to hell, etc)?

 

And I'm sure this guy is just "holding it wrong":

 

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13 minutes ago, Mark Ingram said:

They are not the place where our average user goes to say "Everything was fine, thanks."

Top marks! This forum is where people usually go to say "something does not work" or to vent one's spleen about something being clunky or a missing feature. There are far fewer threads along the lines of "well done, Serif", though they are here too. I have personally created threads for both types. But overall my experience has been very positive.

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13 hours ago, Mark Ingram said:

And with that final point, I would like to say, these forums are not representative of our overall customer base. The forums are a location that people come to when they have problems, or when they want to be actively involved in feature discussions or partake in the beta tests. They are not the place where our average user goes to say "Everything was fine, thanks.". I feel like a lot of discussions here are skewed by the belief that some percentage of users on the forum represent the overall feeling of our customers. 

 

Mmm, that's slippery logic and I don't know that you understand how that can come across, Mark. Any legitimate feedback can be overlooked with that mindset. After all, what's problematic to take in can be averaged out by other feedback by sheer quantity. It's not a very good test for the quality of feedback and it can create bias and echo-chambers. Saying certain feedback methods are only outliers defeats the purpose of collecting different types of data. Also, social and particularly the forums are one of the main ways your most engaged and sensitive (for good or bad) clients can connect and are taking the time to be diligent with feedback. (People have to register to even post.) I'd like to think we're helping in to fill in a much larger picture, not whinge into empty space.

Of course a portion of users will pick up the software because it's cheap (just being realistic), but if that's the option that is being offered, then it would all stop there. However, if a company is seeking to be an exceptional company that goes above and beyond beyond the perception of "good enough", then this approach should be broken.

The posters also don't exist in a sandbox (no pun intended). They have had experiences with other software, they talk with other people in the industry, they work with them on a daily basis, they deal with clients, etc. I can say for myself that a lot of what I read here I have seen mirrored in perpetuity through social. Designers I watch make similar commentary and they're not necessarily influenced by what's popular on social. Many do know what works and doesn't work in the business. So I say this to say: Every customer should be treated the same and feedback should never be ignored or brushed off.

Many of us left Adobe or won't deal with certain companies because they treat us the corporate way. It's the attitude of well there's 100 of these people, but for every 100 of them there's 100,000 of these and they are paying customers that don't complain. So get rekt, etc. Edit: That part is what people can be very reactive to and may be some of what you are seeing, because to some degree they've come to expect this mentality and are just waiting for the pin to drop. Instead of waiting, we dropped Adobe/other alternatives and came here hoping for something better.

For me, I never thought of Affinity as an Adobe replacement. I'm really hoping it will be quite different. Edit: In case that wasn't clear for some reason, I'm characterizing the different-ness from Adobe as a good.

Edit: BTW, I did want to make clear this isn't meant to put words in anyone's mouth or to cause a disagreement. So please DO NOT take it that direction. I just thought it might be constructive for the sake of discussion to point out how certain wordings can be so easily misconstrued even though it's not what we intended. I don't want anyone to feel bad. We offer our own filters and individual biases when we post. That's natural. That's why we need to take on all the feedback we possibly can and that's what makes it a discussion. That's the purpose.

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12 hours ago, LondonSquirrel said:

Top marks! This forum is where people usually go to say "something does not work" or to vent one's spleen about something being clunky or a missing feature. There are far fewer threads along the lines of "well done, Serif", though they are here too. I have personally created threads for both types. But overall my experience has been very positive.

Many of these happy user posts get trolled hard if they're in the "wrong" threads or somehow accidentally step on person's chosen tantrum/pet peeve. I can only imagine how the staff feels as they go through this on a regular basis. So this does tend to cause people (like me, ha) to avoid starting such threads because I don't tend to like dealing with drama in perpetuity. I also don't want to be lumped in with any lunacy. I do not think I am alone. Hence my post count being quite low since when I joined, because I tend to err on the side of caution when posting for a few reasons. Only recently am I posting more again and it's really because I'm literally stoked there's finally been an upgrade. It's long been overdue.

As bad as the MSIX/upgrade/not upgrade fee threads have been, there's more posters like me who are either new or have been here a while reading/writing/lurking and are catching up and posting constructive feedback. It reminds me of when I joined and the first updates were coming in. Also the betas. I've always ran them when I could think to go download if I wasn't posting at the time, though I rarely have problems with Affinity now...

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On 11/17/2022 at 11:47 PM, rvst said:

It doesn't launch or integrate with the OS and other applications in the same way at all, however. This is the cause of all the complaints.

I think you are quite wrong there, because the Affinity apps use MSIX, and therefore an alias for integration, poorly written or free apps tend to not recognize the alias. For example xnview or DxO are 2 culprits but in my case Capture One picks it up but I haven't checked ON1 Photo RAW because I use another method.

Unfortunately most of the apps written for windows are dependant on previous versions of Windows and are NOT updated for the new OS versions as they emerge. E.G. there is going to be problems with older apps that rely on .NET v3 soon.

Both PC’s Win 11 x64 System with Intuos Pen & Touch 
PC1 ASUS ROG Strix - AMD Ryzen 9 6900X CPU @ 3.3GHz. 32GB RAM

- GPU 1: AMD Radeon integrated. GPU 2: NVIDIA RTX 3060, 6GB
PC2 HP Pavilion - 
Intel® Core™ i7-7700HQ CPU @ 2.80GHz (8 CPUs), 16GB RAM
 - GPU 1: Intel HD Graphics 630, GPU 2: NVIDIA GTX1050, 4GB

iPad (8th Gen) 2020

 

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