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Comment by approxim8ion | Hacker News Reader

Each program in Windows does not live with all its needs in its own folder though. Some store some of their stuff in the installation directory, others in AppData, others in ProgramData, others in the User's home folder (C:/<username/...) and so on.

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I've got lots of programs that are entirely self-contained and the folder can simply be moved to a new computer and it "just works", they include all the data files and dll's they want, and they keep their user-data under their own directory too, which is exactly how I want it for a _PERSONAL_ computer.

That's fine. But it's not really a standard. Just an approach, and not one that is guaranteed to work unless that's an explicit goal for the program involved.

Tbf, you can do the same thing on Linux with AppImages.

You can do the same with normal linux programs too, mine work fine, but the insistence of pulling apart a program and spread throughout the filesystem is in my opinion misunderstood. Sure, it made sense when it was introduced, for the reasons it was introduced, mainly, that drives were so small that you had to.

There are very very few cases today where your program and it's accompanying files are so large that they cannot be expected to live on only a single disk.

Splitting app binaries that can be easily redownloaded from configs and user data makes a lot of sense. Also caches that can be deleted and rebuilt.

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