Hacker News Reader

Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

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when I download Mac software and double click it, nothing seems to happen because it's a "disk image" (talk about an outdated concept), which means I have to know to navigate to the Finder, find the actual thing I want, and then remember to unmount the image when I'm done.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com