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Can we talk about the rude installers not asking for installation locations?

47 points breezk0 | 1 comments | 31 Oct 25 14:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | source

Title.

I think it is very rude to just install to any "default" directory and not asks the user where he wants it to be installed.

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diffeomorphism ◴[31 Oct 25 15:02 UTC] No.45772742[source]▶
Weird windows centric view.

There shouldn't even be a question where to put things much less a "wherever you want". Instead you want a sane, sensible standard.

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1. wongarsu ◴[31 Oct 25 15:26 UTC] No.45773120[source]▶
Configuration should go in a defined place. /etc and ~/.config on linux, registry and %appdata% on Windows. A common location makes management, synchronization and backups easier, and space is rarely a concern for configs. Cache directories should go in a defined place. /var/ and ~/.cache on linux, %localappdata% on Windows.

But application files have a huge size range depending on the assets the program needs (typical sizes range from the tens of MB to the tens of GB, with large outliers in either direction). I have multiple tiers of storage (a terabyte of SSD, multiple TB of HDD, tens of TB of network storage) and allocate my software to the desired storage tier depending on my needs

And this isn't just a thing on Windows, Android does the same by allowing you to moving apps to the SD card, provided you have one. Management is just greatly simplified in that case because you have at most two meaningful storage locations on an Android location, while desktop or laptop might have any number of them