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Comment by givan | Hacker News Reader

Not computer users, just the windows users.

I never understood the install wizards for windows software, in 99% of the time you just click "next" until it stops asking for more "next".

And now they all sneak garbage adware with the check boxes enabled by default because most people just click "next" anyway.

Also the whole download and install drivers/utilities etc after installation is very time consuming because the OS has almost nothing bundled and what is bundled is MS only like internet explorer, nothing you can choose in that "next" wizard.

Windows is like a granny in the OS world, she needs to retire.

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This is nonsense fanboism. Modern versions of Windows are extremely similar to OS X from a usability perspective. OS X has plenty of counterintuitive warts. Computers of any flavor are pretty hard to use.

> I never understood the install wizards for windows software...

I never understood why half the time when I download Mac software and double click it, nothing seems to happen because it's a "disk image" (talk about an outdated concept), which means I have to know to navigate to the Finder, find the actual thing I want, and then remember to unmount the image when I'm done.

>This is nonsense fanboism I'm not a fanboy, I didn't mention apple or anything else, I used ubuntu for a long time and it doesn't have this kind of problems.

Modern versions of windows are extremely similar from a usability perspective, sure. But that's windows as defined by microsoft, and OSX as defined by apple. The problem occurs because third parties try to shoehorn all kinds of crap into windows applications and onto the windows desktop. There's nothing wrong with windows in theory, but in practice there sure are a lot of people trying to fuck up windows. It's much less of a problem on other operating systems.

there sure are a lot of people try to fuck up windows. It's much less of a problem on other operating systems.

Possibly because Windows has many, many, many more users than other operating systems do.

It's like the old urban legend about bank robber Willie Sutton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Sutton) answering a reporter's query about why he robbed banks with "because that's where the money is." Crapware vendors focus on Windows because that's where the users are.

One of the major reasons genetic diversity is important is that it makes it harder for a population to be wiped out by infection. The windows monoculture is inevitably a victim of itself.

It doesn't seem wiped out yet.

It's not advantageous for a parasite to immediately kill it's host. By 'wiped out' I don't mean the literal death of windows installs, I mean in the sense that a pristine windows install will, on average, slowly accumulate cruft until it's on the verge of being unusable. It's not a 1:1 analogy. In a strictly practical sense, an individual windows install may not be nonoperational due to mal/spy/crapware, but the quality of the user experience goes way down as a result of it.

We're not really talking about usability in general - the particular issue of default installs being crapped up is pretty Windows PC (and maybe Android?) specific

WHat's wrong with Android installers? A single file with a single button to press.

This is hilarious. You call others fanboys and then compare the horrific inconvenience of disk images (which I don't understand either but it's what, double-click and then drag, right) to Windows install wizards, uninstall, etc. Get real.

Get real? Why the hostility? Eli's comment is aimed at how unintuitive OS X's system is, not how inconvenient it is compared to Windows.

In my opinion it's not "installing" apps in Mac that can be "unintuitive", it's grasping the fact that a lot of applications are self contained; setting up an application on your OS is as simple as dragging it to a folder on your hard drive (generally) and it can be unintuitive to users that are accustomed to Microsoft installers and package managers.

OSX by default (at least for DMG's) opens a window with the extracted content and most include "setup" instructions ("drag FOO into the Applications folder"), so it's not hard to miss.

> it can be unintuitive to users that are accustomed to Microsoft installers and package managers

I was afraid of that first, but after I briefly explained that to my father 3 years ago, he has never had a problem again (except with Flash Player)

This is a reply to a post that starts with "This is nonsense fanboism". "Get real" seems quite mild to me.

The problem isn't the process of installing. It's the damned trip line installs along the way. If you install Adobe Reader, it shouldn't install McAfee for you. If I install your software, you don't have the right to install browser plugins. In terms of installers, Windows has developed a culture of malware that really needs to go.

Adobe pulls this maneuver on OS X as well. Other Mac apps will try to sneak in some global software for cool effects; I've had Growl installed three of four times without my consent. Obviously the Windows installers were worse on average, but I think OS X would have gone that direction if not for sandboxing. If sandboxing hadn't turned out to be awful I would upgrade. The idea is really good for users, but their implementation is lacking.

Don't install insecure crapware like Adobe Reader. Chrome has an internal pdf reader. I've personally also got Evince installed.

Likewise. I've managed to learn through the misfortune of others. That said the way we find these things out is through the misfortune of others or ourselves.

One thing I noticed when I first bought a Mac was that the driver for my Lexmark printer was about 30MB and integrated properly with the system printing options. On Windows, it was more like 200MB, had its own custom print dialogue which could be themed and had an online gallery for themes which you could download. You could download a theme that turned your printer dialogue into a potato. Not even kidding. On Mac, the printing dialogue was just the standard OS X printer dialogue.

Why is this? I don't know. Maybe they put less, er, effort into the OS X driver because of marketshare. Perhaps it was a different set of developers and the Mac developers had some sense. Maybe it's not even possible to create custom-potato-themed printer dialogues for OS X. All I know is that since moving to OS X I've seen far less crapware and whilst you're right that OS X has some UI warts too, I find that it (and the 3rd party software you install) bugs you a hell of a lot less.

This is nonsense fanboism. Modern versions...

You lost me at the first sentence.

Me too, I clearly missed the bit in the parent where givan openly gushed about OSX being better than Windows at installing software.

> And now they all sneak garbage adware with the check boxes enabled by default because most people just click "next" anyway.

While I agree that OEM computers come installed with a lot of crap, that's not a Windows problem, that's an OEM problem.

> Also the whole download and install drivers/utilities etc after installation is very time consuming because the OS has almost nothing bundle

The OS part of Windows is about 2 gigabytes (tried looking for source, but couldn't find one. Although this explains how you can fit a bootable emergency windows suite on a flash drive). The many other gigabytes are drivers. Plus, it's pretty disingenuous to blame Microsoft for Windows not supporting 3rd party devices, even though Windows checks for driver updates automatically.

While I agree that OEM computers come installed with a lot of crap, that's not a Windows problem, that's an OEM problem.

Windows is as successful as it is because of Microsoft's cooperation with crappy OEMs who are only too happy to betray their customers for a quick buck.

You can't have Windows without the OEMs - show me the Microsoft PC you plan to buy. Microsoft does the best they can, working within their constraints, but at the end of the day they're throwing their product over the fence and letting someone else package it.

And you can't have good OEMs because Microsoft's PC strategy - with WHQL, PNP, UEFI, ACPI, and just about every other hardware initiative they've participated in, has been to make it difficult for hardware manufacturers to innovate in creative, non-standard ways without Microsoft's prior consent. Hence the race to the bottom among PC manufacturers. Cheap PCs, yes, but there's not much room for innovation that hasn't been green-lighted in some way by Microsoft and so the only PC manufacturers who do well are those who can survive on thin margins.

So yes, it is a Windows problem.

Erm no the DoJ anti trust ruling means that Ms can't dictate what the oems can or can't install on their machines.

If you go back and carefully read my post, I said nothing about whether Microsoft could 'dictate' to the OEMs - only that Microsoft doesn't want to sell hardware PCs and that hardware PC OEMs are almost necessarily bad because the market for PCs rewards low price and hardware component stats, not the overall usability, quality, or unique innovation of the product.

Microsoft under Gates and Balmer demonstrated very clearly that they couldn't be trusted to exert their influence over the hardware OEMs. They couldn't resist using their power to hammer small start-ups selling potentially threatening new technologies. So yes, they've lost this lever that might otherwise have been used to protect PC buyers.

I think every OS has lots of crap burden. On linux you have complicated unnecesary things geeks will defend to death. On OS X I recently tried to install octave. How I did it:

Step 1: Create an Apple Store account. Credit cards aren't so common here because bank transfers are basicly free and you automaticly get a debit card from your bank that is universally accepted. If you try to create an account directly you will fail if you don't have a credit card. You need to "purchase" a free App to be able to create an account without credit card information.

Step 2: Download Xcode and skim the licence agreement for 10 minutes so you don't sell your organs to Apple

Step 3: Find the Console Development Tools installation somewhere hidden in the options of xcode

Step 4: Install macports

Step 5: Install octave with macports, this encompasses half an gentoo installation. Things already present on the system like the llvm from xcode get rebuild. This takes hours.

You'd have had a better experience had you:

1. Installed Command Line Tools for Xcode instead of Xcode (you don't need the IDE now for build tools, and yes this used to be painful)

2. use homebrew instead of macports which is more actively maintained and generally works better

>I never understood the install wizards for windows software, in 99% of the time you just click "next" until it stops asking for more "next".

Well, if you use the Windows Store to get applications, you can finally get rid of them.

>the OS has almost nothing bundled

Really? Windows 8, for instance, comes with much of what you'd need. It's bundles a lot more than previous versions of windows

>nothing you can choose in that "next" wizard.

I'm not quite sure what this means.

>I'm not quite sure what this means.

I was referring to the fact that Microsoft does not bundle multiple browsers to choose from and forces everyone to have IE installed and unfortunately most users don't understand what a browser is to fix this.

And this is the reason web developers had nightmares with IE6 in the past and some still have with IE7.

Microsoft shouldn't bundle multiple browsers. Now, I can see your point that they don't exactly provide others (except in the EU)... but I'm not sure this is really such a bad thing.

What operating system does bundle multiple browsers?

By that logic MS should also bundle multiple video and audio player, calculators, image editors, file explorers, email clients and who knows what else. And what's that if not bloatware?

> Not computer users, just the windows users.

Well, on a new Ubuntu installation the first thing I have to do now is:

  sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping

But still way better than the crap windows users have to put up with.

yeah, I definitely prefer 'sudo apt get install this-thing && sudo pray-to-god-this-works'

There's a pray-to-god part, true. Largely when it comes to hardware support, which may require some unpleasant steps. Or may not work at all, though that can be usually known beforehand.

But once you get the hardware to work, apt-get install really is a great way to get quality software. You list a bunch of stuff and it will get installed. Without trying to trick you into bundled crap, without charging you, with quite decent documentation included. If you run into trouble, there are people you can reach out to -- other users of your distro, mailing list, even the authors. It's not perfect, and may be time consuming but head and shoulders above of what regular users of other systems can get nowadays.

More than that. Package is maintained by people who use it themselves and will usually get updated in a timely manner, with minimal effort required on your part.

Actually, there is a certain class of software that works amazingly well that well. Installing apache/php/mysql on linux with apt beats macports or plain windows so hard it's not even funny.

Installing part is easy, I agree but trying to uninstall either one of them leaves a mess behind. Configuration and other misc files are left behind so if your program does not start because the conf is corrupted, uninstalling and installing doesn't work. It seems though that Ubuntu never lets the program know that it is being uninstalled leaving behind a string of custom generated files.

Well that's what purge rather than uninstall is for, does it not reliably wipe out configs?

I did on some occasions but it too din't do the job. It couldn't recognize the custom generated log and config files. I was stuck tracing those files and removing them manually. If I remember correctly this was for postfix/dovecot installations.

well, the last time when I used windows was like sometime between 2006-2007, I never had to pray, everything seems to work just fine and smooth until now.

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