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Comment by mrlala | Hacker News Reader

You mean a desktop app that you need to download, install, and during the installation potentially give some privileges that can harm your computer.. then you are trying to install and it doesn't have the right dependency so it asks you to find some random thing to get it working. Then you do get it installed, but don't know where it installed to so you have to go searching for it. Then you get it up and running and it works fine. You play with it for 5 min. 2 months later you come back to it and want the newest version, so you have to download an update, because the auto-update feature was blocked by your firewall. Then you get it updated and running. A couple days later you decide not to use it, so you go to uninstall it. The uninstaller fails for who the f knows why so you delete the folder on your drive, but your OS still think it's installed. So you figure out how to manually remove it.

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That's all well and good if you trust other people. FWIW this guy allows you to download his app, and it's open source and a very impressive achievement. In general though, I'd much prefer having an old version of an app that works (I'm still using Max 2016 or something) than the joy of waking up one day and have things be worse than they were before. All the things you mentioned in my view are a small price to pay for peace of mind that you're not beholden to someone else's whims. (See the story about Oculus currently on the front page)

> 2 months later you come back to it and want the newest version, so you have to download an update, because the auto-update feature was blocked by your firewall. Then you get it updated and running. A couple days later you decide not to use it, so you go to uninstall it. The uninstaller fails for who the f knows why so you delete the folder on your drive, but your OS still think it's installed. So you figure out how to manually remove it.

this is incredibly better than the "web scenario" which is (and I got burned by this two times - there won't ever be a third time), "you come back to the app two months later, except the company has shut down and all your data removed" or "you come back to the app two months later, but you now have to pay for the superior tier if you want to be able to edit your stuff because some features you were using have been moved in that tier" (hello genmymodel), or "you come back to the app two months later and it's now super slow and has a couple annoying bugs but you can't downgrade because it's a web app" (hello asana).

You left out the part where a year goes by and the web app randomly stops working because a subtle change in web browsers broke the app.

I don't have any of the problems you describe with updates or installers.

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