Windows does have quirks: MSI installers, Inno Setup, NSIS, and custom EXEs may or may not support silent mode. When they don’t, automation is ugly (AutoIt, AutoHotKey).

But Windows also has strong automation tooling: PowerShell, WinRM, Chocolatey, Winget, MSIX packaging. These provide far more than “mouse and keyboard emulation.”

So your statement ignores the modern ecosystem and overstates the weakness.

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yndoendo 2 days ago | parent [-]

Please note, you are assuming I have the ability to control the version of Windows the product lives on. Some products still have to support up to Windows XP.

Also the PowerShell is actually broken. I can use standard network powershell commands that brake the OS applied to network interfaces. Currently waiting on a laptop with bare metal Windows installation to verify if those sanitized PowerShell commands are crashing the VM or Windows itself.

.NET for the longest time was broken with _NetworkInterface.GetAllNetworkInterfaces()_ only returning enabled NICs. This was finally fixed in .NET 9. Work around his to go WIN32 custom coding when older .NET must be used.

.NET WPF touch screen event messaging system is also broken where it would latch depending on how the finger is swiped off a button. Had to dump that and go with WIN32 as work around so that bug didn't have the capability to crush someone's appendage when being used in machinery.

The registry system the OS is built upon is flawed. It does not have well defined layout such as a configuration file.

	▲	Joker_vD 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Please note, you are assuming I have the ability to control the version of Windows the product lives on. Some products still have to support up to Windows XP. It's what, 6 different versions of Windows, with quite clearly defined API "eras"? For Linux, you have just a huge ball of mud^H^H^H distros each of which has (or doesn't have) who knows versions of what, but of course, there you can just give out a .tgz with source code and say to your users "it's your problem now to build it for yourself since you're using Arch".
	▲	p_ing 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Configuration files have a /well defined/ layout? I don't have to guess if it is YES\|NO\|TRUE\|FALSE\|0\|1... or does it use quotes or no quotes around the variable and/or value? Or a space between the variable and the equals sign? Hard to tell with a config file.