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Comment by mikkupikku | Hacker News Reader

I thought the days if needing to "sudo" to install applications on windows were long gone; doesn't basically everything happily do user installations now? I would view a demand to escalate as basically proof that the application is about to do something janky, if not outright malicious. On linux, if I can't build and run software with just my user account, that software has some explaining to do. Virtually every desktop application should be able to run without escalated privileges.

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Your impression is pretty far off, I think. Just naming a program setup.exe makes it escalate by default. Many installers can be used without escalation but going the traditional path isn't suspicious.

> On linux, if I can't build and run software with just my user account, that software has some explaining to do.

Yup same. The software I install as root are those shipping stock with the distro. Others I compile and run from user accounts (like Emacs, which I always compile from source).

on windows and mac they just get a prompt and a lot of people don't read it, care, nor wonder what it's actually doing they just want it to work.

I know you all know this but companies will do this knowing that exploiting all of us.

I use Linux and agreed on all those points. when I used adobe before it wanted to charge me a fee to cancel my subscription and wouldn't let me just 'cancel' in their system so I just blocked the payments on my card and dipped out.

good software, garbage company

Heh, I had a similar situation once, but my bank wouldn't let me block the transactions.

So I switched banks. It was a interesting call with my previous banks support folks.

On linux they just use sudo and similary don't read, care or wonder.

"C:/Program Files" is still the recommended place to install programs, and it requires admin privileges to write to. Some programs (ab)use C:\ProgramData for that purpose instead and therefore don't need admin privliges. But even with that hack, ultimately Windows still uses the https://xkcd.com/1200/ permission model. (Everything runs with full access to all your data.)

On Windows enabling access control is 4 clicks. The problem with enabling it by default is that every time MS tries to harden the defaults there is much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth

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