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As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program

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Re: As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program

#101

Post by inigyou »

frollogaston wrote: post #90
self_awareness wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it has directories and files inside, right? It's only the program that is used to browse is different. It's like you don't use explorer but regedit. It's the only difference. On macOS it's not like you can always type what's inside the plist files with a text editor, sometimes you need to use 'plutil' anyway (if a plist is binary). So to browse Application Support you still often need thirdparty software anyway.…

You use regedit, and only registry keys/values are in there, not other kinds of files. And editing systemwide plists on Mac means authenticating each time you touch one unless you're using a sudo terminal or sudo Finder. It does meaningfully change the experience for whoever is digging into it. Also, Mac plists have two formats, xml and the non-text kind. Now mentioning that, I kinda hate both formats.

What, you don't like foobar instead of foo=bar or bar

Re: As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program

#102

Post by jeroenhd »

JoeSloth wrote: post #15
herf wrote: post #8

It's fine for installing, but uninstalling is madness: Windows uninstallers try to clean up all the registry and user profile stuff they install. Mac apps seem to just leave stuff behind in Local Settings or Caches forever? Containers are not such a bad idea.

Counterpoint: you reinstall something later and all your setting and preferences are still there. It’s a classic cloud vs disk debate about where and who should persist and own the data. Lately I think it’s kinda refreshing that it’s entirely on your disk and up to you.

Decent Windows uninstallers have a checkbox for that. Often disabled by default.

It's not universal, but at least it's possible. Not having to hunt down random directories (or buying a program to do it for you) also has advantages to user control.

Re: As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program

#103

Post by defrost »

frollogaston wrote: post #98
ranger_danger wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and in many cases, Windows uninstallers don't do the equivalent either and leave stuff dangling about because there's no standard.

Lack of standard dirs doesn't really matter in this case because the same dev writes the installer and uninstaller. But I do get annoyed that Windows programs put stuff in random places when I want to look into them, like it's program files, program files (x86), documents, roaming... where tf is %appdata% even

Yeah, I know it's rhetorical, all the same, there are a bunch of ways to query environment variables:

* From a windows CLI type

    SET
and all environment variables will be listed along with their values.

* From a windows CLI type

    SET APP
and all environment variables prefixed with "app" will be listed along with their values (eg: APPDATA ).

* With path location variables, open up file explorer and enter %appdata% in address bar and press enter / click "goto" arrow. File Explorer will expand the variable and show the expanded directory path and contents.

Re: As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program

#104

Post by frollogaston »

inigyou wrote: post #101
frollogaston wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You use regedit, and only registry keys/values are in there, not other kinds of files. And editing systemwide plists on Mac means authenticating each time you touch one unless you're using a sudo terminal or sudo Finder. It does meaningfully change the experience for whoever is digging into it. Also, Mac plists have two formats, xml and the non-text kind. Now mentioning that, I kinda hate both formats.

What, you don't like foo bar instead of foo=bar or bar

The dicts and arrays make it even more fun

Re: As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program

#106

Post by jeroenhd »

t43562 wrote: post #81

A long while ago I found myself helping out with some products MSI installer. I don't think anyone can really point a finger at the Mac and accuse it of having issues by comparison with what seemed to me to be the nightmare from hell of trying to make an installer that would work on various versions of windows. It's not the fault of MSI per se, although its concept seems utterly frightful to me, but the way DLLs work…

Windows' CRT setup allows for binary compatibility with older versions. You can go without if you just statically compile the dependencies into your program, but many Windows developers choose to rely on runtime versions which may or may not be shared.

MSI's biggest mistake was probably granting developers the capability of invoking any program they like. The format was originally designed similar to Linux packages. Installation steps were atomic and reversible. If something went wrong (i.e. you ran out of disk space halfway through), the installer can undo every change step by step so you can try again later without overwrite prompts. Unfortunately, adding the ability to call executables means that atomicity is usually lost.

macOS applications seem to just package every single DLL they need inside of their application folder rather than relying on the OS. I'd do the same if I were developing for macOS with how often Apple likes to make breaking changes.

The symlinking trick for .so files often breaks on Linux. Method parameters change, structs get altered, and you can quickly create working-but-unstable versions if you have a different version of the same program. The Windows way, used by Flatpak and Snap, of targetting known-good sets of libraries will work around that. The macOS way (AppImage) also works but doesn't allow for deduplication. It might, if the AppImage would be uncompressed and files would be extent-aligned on a modern file system, but in practice that won't happen.

In theory, Windows and Linux offer the same app installation flow as macOS. AppImage and huge .exe files can be moved around and deleted just as easily. Windows will let you do all kinds of things with desktop.ini, including custom folder backgrounds, and its native .iso support can offer a very similar mount-then-delete flow to .DMG files.

Re: As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program

#107

Post by orwin »

JoeSloth wrote: post #15
herf wrote: post #8

It's fine for installing, but uninstalling is madness: Windows uninstallers try to clean up all the registry and user profile stuff they install. Mac apps seem to just leave stuff behind in Local Settings or Caches forever? Containers are not such a bad idea.

Counterpoint: you reinstall something later and all your setting and preferences are still there. It’s a classic cloud vs disk debate about where and who should persist and own the data. Lately I think it’s kinda refreshing that it’s entirely on your disk and up to you.

Counterpoint: explain to me how to make two different versions of an app cohabit. I found out about homebrew, so it isn't as much as an issue as it used to be, but in the 2000s, it was impossible to maintain two versions of RoR on mac. Granted, window was not much better (two versions of crypt on ISS took me way too long to install correctly). But for anyone used to sane OS, it was a detriment until homebrew became ubiquitous.

Re: As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program

#108

Post by jeroenhd »

pavlov wrote: post #94

I think the most confusing concept in this process for new users is the shortcut inside the disk image because it breaks the isolation metaphor. So, you download a file, and it's something called an "image" which opens in Finder like you'd inserted an external thumb drive. Fine. You open the image, and inside is... Your own Applications folder? Wait, how can the file I downloaded contain all of my apps? This kind of…

There's a tiny little arrow in the corner to indicate that it's a shortcut.

But this really confused me when I first started using macOS as well. You're just expected to know that the applications folder in the disk image you just downloaded isn't actually inside of the disk image.

When I first opened a .dmg, I thought the arrow symbolised some kind of progress bar and waited for a moment to let it do its installation. That didn't work, so I copy-pasted the folder into my Applications folder manually. When I later opened a different .dmg that had instructions about how I needed to drag and drop myself, I actually realised what I needed to do.

Re: As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program

#109

Post by inigyou »

TylerE wrote: post #49
inigyou wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about running a program to set up another program, isn't that right, hahaha totally insane

Don't even get me started on the registry.

oh my god, non-file structured data! That's terrible! Everything should be a file in ~/.appname!

Re: As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program

#110

Post by inigyou »

self_awareness wrote: post #88
frollogaston wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a directory tree you can just browse in the filesystem, it's a few database files. Idk much about Windows, but at first glance I like how you can browse the Windows registry all in one place without digging through other files.

But it has directories and files inside, right? It's only the program that is used to browse is different. It's like you don't use explorer but regedit. It's the only difference. On macOS it's not like you can always type what's inside the plist files with a text editor, sometimes you need to use 'plutil' anyway (if a plist is binary). So to browse Application Support you still often need thirdparty software anyway.…

Actually the registry doesn't enforce that the stored bytes match the type. If you want, you can store 800 bytes and call it a DWORD.
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