I miss DOS, when there was a one-to-one correspondence between applications and filesystem directories.
Now Windows programs want to put stuff in C:\Progra~1\APPNAME, C:\Progra~2\APPNAME, C:\Users\Applic~1\APPNAME, C:\Users\Local\Roaming\Proiles\AaghThisPathIsHuge, and of course dump garbage into the Registry and your Windows directory as well. And install themselves on your OS partition without any prompting or chance to change the target. And you HAVE to do the click-through installation wizard because everything's built into an EXE using some proprietary black magic, or downloaded from some server in the cloud using keys that only the official installer has (and good luck re-installing if the company goes out of business and the cloud server shuts down). Whereas in the old days you could TYPE the batch file and enter the commands yourself manually, or copy it and make changes. And God forbid you should move anything manually -- when I copied Steam to a partition that wasn't running out of space, it demanded to revalidate, which I couldn't do because the Yahoo throwaway email I'd registered with had expired. (Fortunately nobody had taken it in the meantime and I was able to re-register it.)
I've been using Linux instead for the past years. While generally superior to Windows, its installation procedures have their own set of problems. dpkg -S firefox tells me that web browser shoves stuff in the following places:
I don't mean to pick on this specific application; rather, this is totally typical behavior for many Linux packages.
Some of these directories, e.g. /usr/bin, are a real mess because EVERY application dumps its stuff there:
$ ls /usr/bin | wc -l
1840
Much of the entire reason package managers have to exist in the first place is to try to get a handle on this complexity.
I welcome the NixOS approach, since it's probably as close as we can get to the one-directory-per-application ideal without requiring application changes.
Now Windows programs want to put stuff in C:\Progra~1\APPNAME, C:\Progra~2\APPNAME, C:\Users\Applic~1\APPNAME, C:\Users\Local\Roaming\Proiles\AaghThisPathIsHuge, and of course dump garbage into the Registry and your Windows directory as well. And install themselves on your OS partition without any prompting or chance to change the target. And you HAVE to do the click-through installation wizard because everything's built into an EXE using some proprietary black magic, or downloaded from some server in the cloud using keys that only the official installer has (and good luck re-installing if the company goes out of business and the cloud server shuts down). Whereas in the old days you could TYPE the batch file and enter the commands yourself manually, or copy it and make changes. And God forbid you should move anything manually -- when I copied Steam to a partition that wasn't running out of space, it demanded to revalidate, which I couldn't do because the Yahoo throwaway email I'd registered with had expired. (Fortunately nobody had taken it in the meantime and I was able to re-register it.)
I've been using Linux instead for the past years. While generally superior to Windows, its installation procedures have their own set of problems. dpkg -S firefox tells me that web browser shoves stuff in the following places:
I don't mean to pick on this specific application; rather, this is totally typical behavior for many Linux packages.Some of these directories, e.g. /usr/bin, are a real mess because EVERY application dumps its stuff there:
Much of the entire reason package managers have to exist in the first place is to try to get a handle on this complexity.I welcome the NixOS approach, since it's probably as close as we can get to the one-directory-per-application ideal without requiring application changes.