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

47 points breezk0 | 2 comments | 31 Oct 25 14:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.449s | 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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alphazard ◴[31 Oct 25 15:05 UTC] No.45772796[source]▶
I agree with the sentiment; I also want to control where things are installed. But the framing of the technical problem here is totally backwards.

The operating system or application manager within the operating system (what does flatpak consider itself?) should decide where all application state goes. The application shouldn't ever prompt the user for this, it should just assume a path inside a sandbox. That path inside the sandbox will get mapped to where-ever outside the sandbox, and that's where the user exercises control.

We already see this pattern emerging with docker images. Everything assumes `/data` is a good place to store things, and `/config` is a good place to read configuration from. I want every application to do this. If I want it to store state, then I'll decide to map those to directories that are persisted.

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1. IAmBroom ◴[31 Oct 25 16:47 UTC] No.45774071[source]▶
Spoken like a Linux software developer, I suppose. As a Windows user of generic software (image editing, video players, games, etc.), I want to be able to control such crap. I have a media player that can easily fill a small HD with its mindlessly huge DB, for instance. Rather than manually cleaning periodically, or upgrading my $y$tem, it's easiest to say "Software, store your data here".
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2. alphazard ◴[01 Nov 25 13:24 UTC] No.45781452[source]▶
> Spoken like a Linux software developer

These techniques are pretty general purpose. They aren't merely a cultural artifact of Linux or FOSS. Anyone trying to sanely deal with authorization is going to stumble upon sandboxing, and capabilities, and the principal of least authority, etc. if they look hard enough.