1138
What a joke, can't believe people still voluntarily use this OS
(sh.itjust.works)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
1138 points (97.2% liked)
Programmer Humor
29147 readers
645 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The Microsoft Store is impressively bad. So many random errors that don't give any helpful information that are impossible to fix.
Couldn't install iTunes because my clock was wrong. That certainly wasn't the ERROR I was presented with, but was ultimately the root cause.
That, coincidentally, was the very same evening that I decided to and did uninstall windows on that machine.
It’s probably because TLS uses your system clock to validate certificates. If your clock doesn’t match the server you’re connecting to, TLS fails and you get an “https failed/connection is insecure” error. And Windows likely uses https in the store to ensure MITM attacks can’t replace valid downloads with malicious ones.
I understand the mechanism, and why it is important.
I don't understand why the error message from the store was nothing more than an error code, and why the MSKB for that code had absolutely no mention of a failed ssl negotiation as a possible cause.
Time->TLS errors aren't handled well anywhere.
As critical as they are to 2fa and TLS, you'd think every OS out there would poke around a few time servers and scream bloody murder if the time was off.
Honestly, I think we, as a society, have leaned a little too hard into time as a precise critical failure point. It's fine for things like GPS that actually require it. but our clocks don't need to be precisely the same to tell how recent a request and response are and we can certainly make better hashing algos
wget will give you a sniff of what the problem is. Microsoft Store will not.
I don't NEED an application to necessarily pinpoint the error. Just even a rough direction. Any browser will explicitly tell you if there is a cert issue. That's more than enough to go on.