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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Mac OS hasn't had that from the start. Sure, many apps are installed simply by drag-and-drop to the Applications folder. However, plenty of apps have installers you need to run which usually request administrator credentials to install support files system-wide. Some of these apps have their own updaters which are set to run at startup. In the past, many apps had extensions and control panels they installed into the System Folder which required a reboot.

Finally, many of these same apps had no uninstaller. You had to hunt throughout the system to remove all the stuff they installed, including preference files and cache files just in case you wanted to reinstall without having problems down the road.

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necessitating such programs as https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/ (no affiliation)

it should have been drag-and-drop only from the start. I'd gladly hop on to a Linux/BSD distro which would be clean & consistent with this.

The fact that most Linux distros don't do this is a huge selling point for me. In the early Linux days, software distribution was a nightmare, but today the average popular distro's package management experience is unparalleled. I much prefer using my terminal to manage packages than some unwieldy GUI, and I don't have to leave my terminal to discover new packages or remove old ones.

In my experience, the main weakness of Linux distros' package management experience is they don't distinguish core system functionality from add-on software. After all, a Linux distro is ultimately just a bag of packages. Every package installs into the global `/usr` directory, and the package manager treats third-party packages and system packages equally. The Windows analogue would be if all software installed themselves into the Windows folder, or if you could uninstall ntoskrnl from Add/Remove programs. This leads to several problems:

1. It's easy to inadvertently break one's system. How often have users accidentally uninstalled their desktop environment due a buggy dependency specification or dependency solver? Shouldn't there be a whitelist of core system packages and files that should never be touched during ordinary package transactions? There was also a Fedora bug maybe 1 year ago where a problem with the Google Chrome RPM's GPG signing key blocked system updates unless one manually overrode the package manager transaction to skip broken packages. Imagine if Chrome could cause Windows updates to fail or if a misconfigured Homebrew package could block MacOS updates.

2. It's easy to accumulate cruft over time because there's no out-of-box tracking of software I've added compared to be the base system. I could manually keep a list in a text file, but what about any dependencies of the packages on that list? What about any config files in `/etc` left behind by packages even after they are uninstalled? I'd like an easy way to revert my system to its out-of-box condition without carefully inspecting every line of `dpkg -l` (of which there could hundreds or thousands). With Homebrew on MacOS I can just blow away `/opt/homebrew`.

> It's easy to inadvertently break one's system

rpm/yum/dnf actually have a system for this called protected packages which can't be uninstalled without some ceremony on the part of the caller. Distros use this feature quite sparingly and reserve it for cases where you will truly break your system. Sometimes you want to uninstall your DE.

What is core for you is add on for someone else.

AppImages are still fairly common, though, and those are practically begging for a drag/drop interface

fair. but something similar could be done via a terminal-friendly packaging system — one directory, one location for everything application-related. it's not so much the drag-and-drop I'm drawn to as it is the clear location for each application.

What if there are setup questions that need to be answered that change the trajectory of an install? For example, some installs will have features you can opt out of to save space.

good question. that would not be an easy problem to work out.

Fedora-Gnome has a pretty nice software catalog with one click install and centrally managed updates. I'm sure there's a couple things I've done without because I didn't want to bother installing via dnf but it's my daily driver, no issues

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