> Why doesn't the README file explain what this repository is doing?
It explains exactly what it's doing.
"Microsoft Store package for Windows LTSC."
It provides a Microsoft Store package for LTSC builds, and an install script that allows it to actually work. Windows LTSC builds don't have Microsoft Store preinstalled, and Microsoft offers no official way to re-enable it.
> Windows LTSC builds don't have Microsoft Store preinstalled
No, it's not that it isn't "preinstalled", the Microsoft Store is literally not supported on LTSC, by design. LTSC was never intended to run the Store. The original use case for LTSC was for ATMs, industrial control equipment, hospitals, and the like, where IoT wasn't appropriate, where you needed the ability to run full desktop applications.
> Microsoft offers no official way to re-enable it.
Yeah that's because the Store was never supposed to run on LTSC. It's not supported. Why would they offer an official way to re-enable it? The whole point of LTSC is that it doesn't include the store.
If someone cobbled together an ugly hack to shoehorn it in, by definition it could break at any time.
If by "customer" you mean "way of making money", I agree, since I didn’t pay for it. OTOH, I have been running LTSC on my desktop for years because it's the best edition of Windows, and I haven't had any issues with the Store, which I had to install manually, thus far.
What the fuck is even your problem? You come in here hot ripping into everyone because a solo hacker project is posted to hackernews and you go rabida cause it's not corpo enough? You realize this is hacker news and not a business meeting? No one is here to make you money or talk about "customers"
To be fair, the headline could have been better worded. The convention for something like this is
“Show HN: Title of Repo”
I could understand how one might not understand what the aim of this post was. Maybe the ensuing conversation could have been handled better, but I would certainly include the parent comment in that indictment.
The store is also an app on windows and is sometimes an hard dependency to install apps that only exist on the windows store without having to jump through many hoops. It's usually part of windows itself in the regular retail builds of windows, but LTSC which is meant for enterprise and embedded system does not include it. Installing it is not straightforward which is what this repo provides.
There's no source code, it's a just a bunch of binaries and an install/uninstall script.
Edit: I should clarify that the link provided in the repo is not the microsoft store that the apps refer to. This would be a better link https://apps.microsoft.com
I don't think there's anything nefarious going on here but to someone just quickly looking over the page it has the impression of being an official Microsoft project, given the gratuitous use of their trademark and zero mention of it being a "community" effort.
> The lack of support on LTSC is the least baffling thing going on here but I'm open to the possibility that I'm misunderstanding something....
And yea, you're right, but Indeed, many people need to use the store on LTSC, especially after Microsoft migrated many ecosystem attempts to the store, for example Microsoft Photos and some extensions like HEIC, and now not only UWP applications can enter the store; regular applications can also do so. It actually poses a very big problem that we cannot use the store anymore, at least that's what I think.
Furthermore, it is not just LTSC 2019 that cannot be used; this means that older versions of Windows (at least 1809 or older) are also no longer able to use it. In other words, we can no longer use the store on older versions of Windows. You might say that Microsoft itself didn't intend to provide support for older versions, and yea, I agree, that's true. However, the fact is that many people use Windows largely because of its compatibility advantages. I believe everyone should at least be aware that Microsoft is not as compatible with older programs, especially its own, which is what I want to express.
As for the license, I would like to clarify that it is only to prevent the packaging scripts from being used for commercial purposes and promotion. As you can see, this repository is not specifically intended for hosting store programs, so it does NOT apply to the store programs themselves, but only to the deployment scripts :)
Microsoft has jumped the shark with the way they're pushing their apps through this. It recently took me ~15 minutes of figuring out how to install the Windows Terminal on a newish version of Windows Server. Visiting Microsoft's website to download it was fruitless; the Github releases page was where I needed to be.
This is a build of windows targeting long term deployments and embedded system, so it's essentially a pared down version of windows to reduce memory requirements. One of those things is the microsoft store which is often needed to install certain apps without having to mess around with the command line, etc.
Using LTSC to avoid bloat is like removing the chairs and radio from your car to reduce weight. My experience with Win 10 LTSC was not terribly faster than Windows 10 Home, and night-and-day slower compared to a GNOME or KDE setup.
I suppose it's a fair play if you're contractually obligated to play Riot-published games or something, but... man. I've had better performance playing games on DXVK since 2016. Windows is a heavy hog.
> Using LTSC to avoid bloat is like removing the chairs and radio from your car to reduce weight.
LOL, I don't think that's how you meant it, but 100% agreed those are some of the first things to go when you wanna have fun in a car.
Windows LTSC is an amazing experience compared to vanilla windows, it's actually a decent OS that you can more or less control and you don't have to spend a weekend debloating and figuing out how to rip out cortana and ads and all the other garbage.
If your computer has weak spindle I/O and low RAM, then using LTSC is a useful shortcut to disabling background services that consume those resources. If resources are plentiful then it’ll have no gains. Also:
If you don't have personal experience with LTSC, it's probably a good time to stop opining on it. Having full access to group policy and total control over application and update choices on your own PC is not just a "cosmetic solution."
I don't follow what's going on here. I'm running current Windows 11 Pro, licenses purchased from one of the markets for under AUD$50, and turned off all the standard annoyances via setting toggles and never see an ad or weather report etc.
Or get an edition that doesn't have all of that to begin with, and is supported for 10 years so you don't have to worry about updates mysteriously resetting the annoyance settings that you've disabled, or randomly breaking stuff.
I have a dedicated Windows 11 gaming laptop and I'm about at my breaking point of putting another drive in it to test out the games that I care about on Linux. Windows was tolerable to use just for gaming, but the hoops that you have to go through to do some things in Windows are ridiculous. Removing the Game Bar (and stopping Windows from bugging you about it afterwards) is way more difficult than it should be. Also the driver update ping-pong that happens with my Intel video card is maddening. I'll have the driver fully updated and functional, then Windows Update periodically decides to downgrade it to one that's ~2 years old (which breaks stuff.)
If you're using steam, the ProtonDB website [1] has a feature where you can easily hook it up to your Steam account and get a full accounting of your entire collection on one screen.
I don't want to overpromise anything, but ProtonDB is if anything conservative; I find things working better than expected more often than I am disappointed by a listing now. Games with heavy anti-cheat for online multiplayer are often not a good bet, and really old stuff is sometimes not very well supported (although even so, surprisingly well), but Linux gaming quietly snuck up when nobody was looking and one step at a time has become something where I fairly casually just expect games to work in Linux now, without me having to do much more than poke Steam to use Proton manually sometimes.
Single GPU passthrough my solution to any game that requires kernel level anticheat (lmao, no, you're not getting it on my Linux box, silly malware game devs) or does not run under Proton.
Run Linux on the host system all the time, run Windows in a VM only when necessary, and give Windows a GPU only when necessary.
From a quick search, Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 5 years as a baseline, and Ubuntu Pro goes up to 12 years. RHEL releases are supported for 10 years.
I'm guessing it's similar with SUSE and other "business" distros.
Ubuntu Pro and RHEL are both 10 years for their standard lifecycle, with optional add-ons to go longer. Ubuntu's is called "Legacy Support" to get an extra 2 years, RHEL's is called "Extended Life-cycle Support" to get an extra 3-4 years.
Why is a repository called 'Microsoft Store' being hosted on a seemingly random github account?
Why doesn't the README file explain what this repository is doing?
OP, what did you hope to accomplish with this submission?
The lack of support on LTSC is the least baffling thing going on here but I'm open to the possibility that I'm misunderstanding something....
> Why doesn't the README file explain what this repository is doing?
It explains exactly what it's doing.
"Microsoft Store package for Windows LTSC."
It provides a Microsoft Store package for LTSC builds, and an install script that allows it to actually work. Windows LTSC builds don't have Microsoft Store preinstalled, and Microsoft offers no official way to re-enable it.
> Windows LTSC builds don't have Microsoft Store preinstalled
No, it's not that it isn't "preinstalled", the Microsoft Store is literally not supported on LTSC, by design. LTSC was never intended to run the Store. The original use case for LTSC was for ATMs, industrial control equipment, hospitals, and the like, where IoT wasn't appropriate, where you needed the ability to run full desktop applications.
> Microsoft offers no official way to re-enable it.
Yeah that's because the Store was never supposed to run on LTSC. It's not supported. Why would they offer an official way to re-enable it? The whole point of LTSC is that it doesn't include the store.
If someone cobbled together an ugly hack to shoehorn it in, by definition it could break at any time.
Which it has.
There is no customer for this.
If by "customer" you mean "way of making money", I agree, since I didn’t pay for it. OTOH, I have been running LTSC on my desktop for years because it's the best edition of Windows, and I haven't had any issues with the Store, which I had to install manually, thus far.
> There is no customer for this.
Lots of people including myself run LTSC to minimize Microsoft shitware.
[flagged]
> Anyone pirating LTSC is by definition not a customer and has no right to make any demands of Microsoft.
Luckily, no demand was made, just a solution offered by the community.
What the fuck is even your problem? You come in here hot ripping into everyone because a solo hacker project is posted to hackernews and you go rabida cause it's not corpo enough? You realize this is hacker news and not a business meeting? No one is here to make you money or talk about "customers"
To be fair, the headline could have been better worded. The convention for something like this is
“Show HN: Title of Repo”
I could understand how one might not understand what the aim of this post was. Maybe the ensuing conversation could have been handled better, but I would certainly include the parent comment in that indictment.
> No one is here to make you money or talk about "customers"
Have you ever read this site before? Half of it is about that and startup culture.
Ok, but the brief README links to an actual microsoft.com domain (https://www.microsoft.com/store).
Why would you need a package to wrap a website? Wouldn't the website be accessible on a LTSC build, even if the official package isn't available?
If this is filling a highly useful role that I'm admittedly oblivious to, why are there only three commits in the project history?
(Best I can tell, this is a personal project that somehow made it to HN front page)
The store is also an app on windows and is sometimes an hard dependency to install apps that only exist on the windows store without having to jump through many hoops. It's usually part of windows itself in the regular retail builds of windows, but LTSC which is meant for enterprise and embedded system does not include it. Installing it is not straightforward which is what this repo provides.
There's no source code, it's a just a bunch of binaries and an install/uninstall script.
Edit: I should clarify that the link provided in the repo is not the microsoft store that the apps refer to. This would be a better link https://apps.microsoft.com
Its not just the store - its also the XBOX app/store and the framework to install "modern" applications that are .msix, appx, appxbundle.
I'm not seeing those attached to the repo linked here, and wonder if thats part of the reason why it wont work on older LTSC versions.
Yeah they do. Run `wsreset.exe -i` in powershell and it'll install the Windows Store after a few minutes.
I don't think there's anything nefarious going on here but to someone just quickly looking over the page it has the impression of being an official Microsoft project, given the gratuitous use of their trademark and zero mention of it being a "community" effort.
Hi, sorry for the late response :)
> The lack of support on LTSC is the least baffling thing going on here but I'm open to the possibility that I'm misunderstanding something....
And yea, you're right, but Indeed, many people need to use the store on LTSC, especially after Microsoft migrated many ecosystem attempts to the store, for example Microsoft Photos and some extensions like HEIC, and now not only UWP applications can enter the store; regular applications can also do so. It actually poses a very big problem that we cannot use the store anymore, at least that's what I think.
Furthermore, it is not just LTSC 2019 that cannot be used; this means that older versions of Windows (at least 1809 or older) are also no longer able to use it. In other words, we can no longer use the store on older versions of Windows. You might say that Microsoft itself didn't intend to provide support for older versions, and yea, I agree, that's true. However, the fact is that many people use Windows largely because of its compatibility advantages. I believe everyone should at least be aware that Microsoft is not as compatible with older programs, especially its own, which is what I want to express.
As for the license, I would like to clarify that it is only to prevent the packaging scripts from being used for commercial purposes and promotion. As you can see, this repository is not specifically intended for hosting store programs, so it does NOT apply to the store programs themselves, but only to the deployment scripts :)
> Why is a repository called 'Microsoft Store' being hosted on a seemingly random github account?
Why not? I could spin up a repo called "Bradford Store" or "Google Store" or whatever I want. The maintainer just wanted "Microsoft Store"
> Why doesn't the README file explain what this repository is doing?
It does, and also answers your first question.
> OP, what did you hope to accomplish with this submission?
Because they knew HN would be interested. Same as every other OP that submits something.
> I'm open to the possibility that I'm misunderstanding something....
It does seem to be the case.
The license file in that repo is truely comical.
I'm guessing this is "Tell HN: $TITLE", with a random README.md as source, in lieu of some random blog post
FYI: 1809/LTSC 2019 refer to the long term support build of Windows 10. Took me a while to figure this out.
Microsoft has jumped the shark with the way they're pushing their apps through this. It recently took me ~15 minutes of figuring out how to install the Windows Terminal on a newish version of Windows Server. Visiting Microsoft's website to download it was fruitless; the Github releases page was where I needed to be.
In Windows terminology LTSC = Long-Term Servicing Channel
which is similar to
Ubuntu, Node.js etc calling it it LTS = Long Term Support
It's more than that, or in this case, less.
This is a build of windows targeting long term deployments and embedded system, so it's essentially a pared down version of windows to reduce memory requirements. One of those things is the microsoft store which is often needed to install certain apps without having to mess around with the command line, etc.
Sounds more like a blessing than a curse.
Especially on LTSC hosts.
I had a very Jeremy Clarkson "Oh no! Anyway..." moment reading the headline.
does it mean winget will stop working as well?
only for the msstore hosted stuff, repo should be fine
Yeah, you're on LTSC. The only reason you should be using it is because you have a critical app that requires it for some reason, not the app store.
Or you run it because you don't want all the bloat that Windows comes with by default...
My gaming PC runs Windows 11 LTSC.
Using LTSC to avoid bloat is like removing the chairs and radio from your car to reduce weight. My experience with Win 10 LTSC was not terribly faster than Windows 10 Home, and night-and-day slower compared to a GNOME or KDE setup.
I suppose it's a fair play if you're contractually obligated to play Riot-published games or something, but... man. I've had better performance playing games on DXVK since 2016. Windows is a heavy hog.
> Using LTSC to avoid bloat is like removing the chairs and radio from your car to reduce weight.
LOL, I don't think that's how you meant it, but 100% agreed those are some of the first things to go when you wanna have fun in a car.
Windows LTSC is an amazing experience compared to vanilla windows, it's actually a decent OS that you can more or less control and you don't have to spend a weekend debloating and figuing out how to rip out cortana and ads and all the other garbage.
[flagged]
If your computer has weak spindle I/O and low RAM, then using LTSC is a useful shortcut to disabling background services that consume those resources. If resources are plentiful then it’ll have no gains. Also:
https://24hoursoflemons.com/blog/heroic-lemons-buick-reatta-...
How about: using LTSC is like driving a car down a highway without flashing advertisement billboards. You can focus on driving.
It does at the very least remove the built in ads in the OS.
If you don't have personal experience with LTSC, it's probably a good time to stop opining on it. Having full access to group policy and total control over application and update choices on your own PC is not just a "cosmetic solution."
It's not about performance. It's about not having Candy Crush Saga ads in the Start menu.
I don't follow what's going on here. I'm running current Windows 11 Pro, licenses purchased from one of the markets for under AUD$50, and turned off all the standard annoyances via setting toggles and never see an ad or weather report etc.
Systems are snappy on 6th gen i7 laptops.
Or get an edition that doesn't have all of that to begin with, and is supported for 10 years so you don't have to worry about updates mysteriously resetting the annoyance settings that you've disabled, or randomly breaking stuff.
Just install using the "English (World)" locale.
This was sufficient justification for me
I considered that on my new gaming PC, but I installed Arch and it plays every game that I care about just fine.
I have a dedicated Windows 11 gaming laptop and I'm about at my breaking point of putting another drive in it to test out the games that I care about on Linux. Windows was tolerable to use just for gaming, but the hoops that you have to go through to do some things in Windows are ridiculous. Removing the Game Bar (and stopping Windows from bugging you about it afterwards) is way more difficult than it should be. Also the driver update ping-pong that happens with my Intel video card is maddening. I'll have the driver fully updated and functional, then Windows Update periodically decides to downgrade it to one that's ~2 years old (which breaks stuff.)
If you're using steam, the ProtonDB website [1] has a feature where you can easily hook it up to your Steam account and get a full accounting of your entire collection on one screen.
I don't want to overpromise anything, but ProtonDB is if anything conservative; I find things working better than expected more often than I am disappointed by a listing now. Games with heavy anti-cheat for online multiplayer are often not a good bet, and really old stuff is sometimes not very well supported (although even so, surprisingly well), but Linux gaming quietly snuck up when nobody was looking and one step at a time has become something where I fairly casually just expect games to work in Linux now, without me having to do much more than poke Steam to use Proton manually sometimes.
[1]: https://www.protondb.com/
Single GPU passthrough my solution to any game that requires kernel level anticheat (lmao, no, you're not getting it on my Linux box, silly malware game devs) or does not run under Proton.
Run Linux on the host system all the time, run Windows in a VM only when necessary, and give Windows a GPU only when necessary.
So I assume you have two GPUs, one less powerful for the Linux desktop, and a more powerful one for gaming?
Can you switch more powerful GPU between passthrough and playing native Linux games without a wayland/x11 restart?
Sounds great! Which VM can do that?
Linux KVM. I recommend the following guide if you want an opinionated (positive) take on it: https://github.com/martinopiaggi/Single-GPU-Passthrough-for-...
>The only reason you should be using it is because you have a critical app that requires it for some reason
Yes, my sanity.
Honestly if I never see MS store again I’ll consider it a win. Had plenty frustrating experiences with it and very positives
Oh no!
Anyway
If Windows was open source, we could have avoided this.
Microsoft <3 Open Source! (but only if they can make money on it)
Microsoft EEEs Open Source.
How many major distros support releases for 6 years?
From a quick search, Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 5 years as a baseline, and Ubuntu Pro goes up to 12 years. RHEL releases are supported for 10 years.
I'm guessing it's similar with SUSE and other "business" distros.
Ubuntu Pro and RHEL are both 10 years for their standard lifecycle, with optional add-ons to go longer. Ubuntu's is called "Legacy Support" to get an extra 2 years, RHEL's is called "Extended Life-cycle Support" to get an extra 3-4 years.
https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle#server-desktop-eol-ol...
https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata#Life...
I was wondering how many people would take my comment seriously. Looks like at least 5 people.
CentOS 7 is open source but here we are!