I wanted to start a discussion to see why LabVIEW and device drivers takes so long to install and to see if this is recognized as a problem by NI.
The LabVIEW install process has always seemed to take a long time and even though the install process has changed drastically over the last few years it seems just as slow as ever (probably worse now then before). We have a lot of machines with LabVIEW so I do the full install about 2-5 times a month. I'm not sure the workflow that my company follows is "normal" so we might install LabVIEW more than the average developer. We've tried work around tactics like creating hard drives for common hardware and cloning those to make things easier but you still have to update the base image for any new update. Some times you can just let the installer run over night or on a weekend but there are times when you just have to sit around and wait for it.
With that said the average install time for me is about 8 hours to install full LabVIEW with all of the drivers and toolkits. The time obviously varies based on the computer and what type of hardware but it's always slow. I've never encountered another program that is anywhere close to this (I'm sure they exist though). The full size of the offline LabVIEW installer for 2020 is over 30 GBs so I'm sure that's part of the reason why it takes so long but that begs the question of why does the installer has to be so large.
Anyone have any additional insight on this or any information on an effort by NI to improve this?