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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

#181

Post by eviks »

bni wrote: post #77

This is one of my favorite things with the Mac. I feel it is very intuitive me moving the app to Applications, then just move it to trash if it sucks and it is completely gone. setup.exe .pkg installers make me feel dirty because I hav enough control over how it will fuck up my system or not.

The moving step is not intuitive, read other comments, it's also redundant in a better designed system. And of course it's not completely gone, but leaves plenty of garbage behind. And of course you have no control over it

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

#182

Post by BerislavLopac »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #122

It really depends what you grew up with I guess. As someone originally coming off of RISC OS[1] way back when, the mac way is closer to intuitive than the windows way, while Linux's approach of splitting files across the entire FS so that you can't possibly find all of them is "The Real WTF". (Nixos is even further from that original intuition in a lot of ways. Oh for the days of drag-dropping the !App dir to whereve…

And this is also the reason why Mac is doing it this way. One of the big goals in development of MacOS X was to keep the experience consistent with the old Macintosh OS 9.x, even though it was based on a completely different paradigm (Unix). And the UX of Macintosh basically developed along with its paradigms, because in many ways it was the first popular OS that widely accepted the things, like windows, menus, trash and the like.

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

#185

Post by andai »

frollogaston wrote: post #46

The dmg thing makes no sense. I do like that the app is self-contained, unlike Windows where it's always an installer, but don't like how deleting the app doesn't clear whatever files it put all over the place.

This one time I ran a debloater for Windows 10. It removed all the UWP apps.

It turned out Minecraft Bedrock was an UWP app.

It also turned out that UWP programs, unlike traditional Windows programs, store their data inside of the application folder.

So not only did it delete the game, but also the game world I had just spent two weeks working on.

(Apparently you're supposed to run the debloater before doing anything else with the computer!)

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

#186

Post by andai »

I'm confused by the title. I expected the article to be about the title, i.e. a windows user's perspective here, but this doesn't appear to be mentioned at all.

It's also quoted, so I thought it was referring to some other post somewhere, but there's nothing about that either. Is the author quoting himself?

Other than that, I found this to be a great article.

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

#187

Post by andai »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #161
ifh-hn wrote: post #159

I'm not a Mac user, and have no.comment about the drag to application folder thing. But as a Linux and windows user, I always liked how windows could have portable apps. These dmg files seem similar to having a portable app. Back in the day I had a usb with my favourite apps and distros on it. I might be wrong since I've never used a Mac before.

> I always liked how windows could have portable apps. Linux has portable apps too - AppImages and static binaries. As for Macs, dmg files are not apps, they're just archives like zip files. The apps go inside the dmg files. And these "apps" are actually just plain old folders with extra metadata that makes macOS treat it like it was an executable. But you can infact navigate to the inside of an app if you use the te…

Linux has portable apps too — the windows ones ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624

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

#188

Post by frollogaston »

eviks wrote: post #177
frollogaston wrote: post #46

The dmg thing makes no sense. I do like that the app is self-contained, unlike Windows where it's always an installer, but don't like how deleting the app doesn't clear whatever files it put all over the place.

Of course it's not always an installer, there are "portable" zips on Windows as well The dmg makes sense this way- you can have some filesystem-specific tricks in your app (special links) that might not be zippable, so you need dmg that is a more compatible container. And deleting the app shouldn't clear everything (like user config) without a prompt, but otherwise it's indeed a big issue in how all the OSes are desi…

.apps are already folders, unlike .exes, so .app.zip is already sufficient. You do need .dmg for symlinks I think, but nobody is symlinking inside their app bundles, or shouldn't be.

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

#189

Post by frollogaston »

ifh-hn wrote: post #162
frollogaston wrote: post #46

The dmg thing makes no sense. I do like that the app is self-contained, unlike Windows where it's always an installer, but don't like how deleting the app doesn't clear whatever files it put all over the place.

You should search for portable apps. For me it's the only good thing about windows.

These sometimes exist, sometimes not, because exes aren't really designed to bundle files inside. I would expect the portable exe to be slower too. Mac apps are designed to be truly portable.

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

#190

Post by frollogaston »

raffael_de wrote: post #125
PufPufPuf wrote: post #65

When I first got a Macbook, I tried installing an app and had no idea what to do once I saw the app icon, arrow and Applications folder with no additional instructions. I didn't figure it out and had to look it up. For an ecosystem praised for its "user friendliness", this was certainly not the best first impression.

As someone who grew up with Windows the canonical equivalent action would have been to select "install" from the dmg file's context menu (which is opened by a right click). The MacOS way to do it feels too gimmicky and different-for-being-different's sake ...

They weren't just trying to be different with Mac, more like it's an outdated part of the system. It made more sense when software was often on CDs or floppies, cause a disk image is a virtual version of that, and that was a nice feature Mac OS had for a long time that Windows didn't. But now it's like the save icon still being a floppy disk in 2026.
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