Maybe just me but I find it very hard trying to see what files if any are updated.
That's precisely why recent versions of the updater have a vertical scroll bar, so you can see more easily which files has been downloaded (if any), while the update is still going.
Also to be honest, having an updater where the user is required to sit there and try to see what files are updated or not, and based on that rule out if the updater worked correctly or not really isn't very user-friendly IMO.
That's not "required" of course! It's only in case you SUSPECT you might have a problem with downloading, so you would know you need the Offline installer. It's to give you CERTAINTY and TRANSPARENCY of the update process, and ways to overcome issues.
As explained so many times, we might just cheated our way out, and assume if it's a file has been downloaded, you have the latest version of it, save some version number somewhere, never bother to check it again until the next update.
This is how most of what you might call "user friendly" updater do, they might look easier to understand, but they are only giving you a false sense of security, because you have no way to know that a file has been downloaded is really the latest version, or even if a file got missing/corrupted after you run the updater.
Since outdated downloads can happen with a CDN caching ( without it, nobody would even be able to download anything, because no single server could possibly survive the load of so many concurrent users ), we provided with two things that other "user friendly" updaters don't have:
- a file by file check that is always made, to be sure every file you have is the one it's supposed to be and nothing is missing, with a progress showing what's really happening.
- an alternative offline installer.
For this reason and to avoid having to worry about these kind of things, I find it so much easier to simply download the offline installer whenever it has been updated and use that one instead.
If with "use that one instead", you mean you update with the Offline installer instead of the Live Updater, it's a mistake because, as also clearly explained in the Top post of this thread:
This Offline installer will only update the complete GSX code. It doesn't contain updates to object models or textures or new operators. Those are only available through the normal online Installer/Updater.
That's why the Offline installer should not be used "instead" of the Live Updater but, as the instructions clearly says:
ONLY after the Live Updater and ONLY after if you suspect you might have an issue with outdated files due to network caching, which should be less and less common, now that GSX have plenty of time to replicate entirely on the cloudflare network, and it will be very unlikely we'll have to push updates to ten of thousands of files again, like for a new release.
Under most circumstances, you only need to run the Live updater, and that's it.