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Comment by throwitaway1123 | Hacker News Reader

> Adobe is a virus. You cannot get rid of it [...] You can't veen close it from the process list without sacrificing 2 hours.

Yup. Last time I installed an Adobe app on a Mac it refused to install unless I entered an administrator password (and didn't describe why that was necessary), and then made itself persistent so that the Creative Cloud background process restarted whenever I rebooted the computer. Ended up downloading KnockKnock to figure out how it was persisting itself: https://objective-see.org/products/knockknock.html

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I'm not in any disagreement with your overall sentiment, but don't all installations on macos require and admin password?

It's been a while since I used it.

Nope, competently-written apps can do everything with only user permissions 99% of the time.

Most of the time when mac installers require an admin password, it's due to a combination of incompetence and malice.

Very frequently I will just unpack installer bundles by hand and drag things where they need to go. No admin password required, and when it is actually required for some functionality, it's usually something really stupid that could have been done differently. E.g. a common one is to install a startup item that boots a background task when you start your computer, but they could just as easily have booted the background task when you launched the app.

As another commenter pointed out, administrator privileges are not required to install the overwhelming majority of apps. The idea that you have to blindly enter your admin password to edit an SVG file or tweak an image is patently absurd to me (my ire is directed at Adobe, not you). Comparable apps like Affinity Designer and Davinci Resolve don't require elevated privileges.

I was required to enter my password the last time I install black magic software on mac.

Every Black Magic app I've downloaded was through the Mac App Store, and I was never prompted to enter my password during installation. You do have to authenticate with the App Store itself to approve installation of any app, but that doesn't grant the app any special privileges — that's required for every App Store installation (even on the iPhone). If a company doesn't distribute their software through the Mac App Store, then they should just give me a DMG or a zip file with a .app bundle in it that I can drag into my applications folder. Many apps are distributed this way (VSCode for example).

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