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Comment by tornato7 | Hacker News Reader

Funny because today I find the install process for Mac much simpler. Most installs are "drag this .app file to your Applications folder", meanwhile on Windows you download an installer that downloads another installer that does who-knows-what to your system and leaves ambiguously-named files and registry modifications all over the place.

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There are plenty of portable windows applications (distributed as a zipped directory) and there are plenty of pkg macOS installers.

I don't really understand why macOS users like this "simple" installation, because when you "uninstall" the app, it leaves all the trash in your system without a chance to clean up. And implying that macOS application somehow will not do "who-knows-what" to your system is just wrong. Docker Desktop is "simple", yet the first thing it does after launch is installing "who-knows-what".

Windows uninstallers also leave all the trash in %AppData%. There’s no generic way to clean all the folders that a program decided to create. Only some uninstallers ask if you want to delete settings and caches.

Given that, dragging a ready-to-run file (folder) to /Apps symlink is much more convenient than “setting up your system for preparation of initializing of downloading of the installation process starter manager, please wait and press next sometimes”.

That's definitely true for more complex apps, but the fact that you can have the executable and all it's resources in one `.app` file is so much simpler and easier for the everyday user. (Yes I know it's a folder that the OS treats as an application, but to a user it looks like one file)

I go back and forth between Windows/Mac/Linux on the daily (right tool for the right job) and each has some strengths. App packaging is far and away one of Mac's current strengths.

I maintained Nativefier (a now defunct open source project that would package web sites as Electron apps) and the ease of packaging an app was Mac > Windows > Linux.

If the installer on Windows is properly done, you actually know exactly what it does to your system (including registry modifications). This includes the ability to remove the application completely.

Whereas on macOS, installation is trivial, but then the application sets up stuff upon first run and that is really intransparent then, with no way of properly uninstalling the app unless there is a dedicated uninstaller.

There are plenty of inscrutable installers for macOS software. DRM-riddled bullshit and enterprise crapware are a disease.

But yeah, the simple case is quite nice.

The one annoying thing macOS apps do is pollute /Library. Even apps that don’t explicitly write to this area end up with dozens of permafiles. Tons of stuff is spewed in there when you install an application that actually uses it. It’s like a directory version of a registry kitchen sink.

Spare a thought for us Windows users - we went from our pristine and oddly beautiful home directories in Windows 7, where everything was neatly squared-away to either AppData\Roaming or AppData\Local - to our post-Electron, lazily-ported software world where my home directory now has no-less than twenty Unix-style dot-directories littering my %USERPROFILE%

Incidentally, the worst offender is Microsoft themselves: it all got worse with .nuget, .vs, .azcopy, .azdata, .azure, .azuredatastudio, .dotnet, etc. I just don't understand it.

Pristine? You mean the same home directory that contains the 80 character NTUSER files? ;)

Or the back-compat symlinks for NetHood, Start, Recent, SendTo, ah yes. I had a post-install VBScript that cleaned those out.

My current sad-thing I’m unhappy about is how the “My Documents” folder ended up being a second AppData folder, with lots of software storing settings, templates, project files, etc in that dir instead of AppData.

Windows absolutely needs application-silos to protect users from lazy apps. I hate to say it, but Apple was 100% right to make iPhone OS a file-system-free OS - we can’t do that on desktop, but gosh-darn-it, why is software so terrible? :(

My solution is to create another folder like “~/Documents/Projects” (because I have no free-standing documents really) and use it as “my” dir. All other paths are known to apps and will be abused.

I do the same thing (on win, mac, and linux). Except I call it "proj" because I'm lazy. In fact, I split it between github and proj because the former is already backed up, but the latter is not.

We Linux users suffer it. Supposedly, nowadays applications should store their files under ~/.config, ~/.local and ~/.cache, but you still find a million applications that create their own folders without following any standards. But at least file browsers hide those folders by default...

I'd have thought you could easily enable some fs-jail that maps any-and-every request matching /~/..+/i wherever you want?

I had never heard of it. Maybe it is possible, but I am too lazy to try it...

Do you have a link to documentation for that?

It's in the XDG Base Directory Specification [0] maintained by freedesktop.org [1] (formerly X Desktop Group)

0: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedesktop.org

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