5 ms·

As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program

245 points by allenc 2mo ago

al_borland 2mo ago
I’ve always appreciated the effort and creativity developers put into making this a good experience, and a learning experience for new users. After all, you never know which app will be someone’s first install. A well made dmg was how I learned to install apps on OS X when I first moved to it 23 years ago. Some developers have gotten lazy with this and expect users to just know. As a result I’ve seen many people running an app out of the dmg file itself for a long time, then they wonder why they have a bunch of stuff mounted.
smallerize 2mo ago
Is the quote in the title a reference to something?
- allenc 2mo ago
  Yeah, it's about how Windows has .msi installers, whereas for MacOS it's a .dmg where you copy the exec binary (which itself is a folder) into the /Applications folder.
  - smallerize 2mo ago
    Ok but who said the quote?
    - mrunkel 2mo ago
      It’s in TFA, but the post title is without the “very”
      - smallerize 2mo ago
        In a gray-on-gray footnote with no name and no direct link. Got it. https://bsky.app/profile/beetlenaut.bsky.social/post/3ml36n5zfks24 https://bsky.app/profile/beetlenaut.bsky.social/post/3ml36n5...
  - jackjeff 2mo ago
    Or any folder. Most of my apps are in sub folders organized by category. :)
  - TylerE 2mo ago
    Apples and Oranges. MSI compares to .pkg (eww) installers on the mac side, not .dmg.
NordStreamYacht 2mo ago
Macs are fun.
- photios 2mo ago
  Too bad nobody needs to eject a floppy disk anymore :D
herf 2mo ago
It's fine for installing, but uninstalling is madness: Windows uninstallers try to clean up all the registry and user profile stuff they install. Mac apps seem to just leave stuff behind in Local Settings or Caches forever? Containers are not such a bad idea.
- sd9 2mo ago
  I agree entirely, my Mac is full of half leftover data from old apps. But that is quite independent from the creativity people show in these install workflows. You could have both a cool .dmg and a proper uninstallation process (but we don’t, for the most part).
- SanjayMehta 2mo ago
  I bought AppZapper years ago, and it still works. There's a free tool out there somewhere as well. Don't knock on this feature, it can be a lifesaver if you've lost the license info. When you reinstall, sometimes the app can retrieve the license from old files.
  - Barbing 2mo ago
    >free tool https://github.com/alienator88/Pearcleaner https://github.com/alienator88/Pearcleaner >if you've lost the license info Or used up your free trial, you get a reminder it’s time to buy!
- card_zero 2mo ago
  I switched to Windows in the year 2000, or 2002, around then. It used to be cool because "the app is just a file that you can place anywhere, or trash when done" was true. They arrived usually as Stuffit or Binhex archives, rarely as disk images. There was no fussy "applications folder" with special permissions. You decompressed the file to anywhere and ran it. If you felt like updating something, this was accomplished by going and getting a new one.
- JoeSloth 2mo ago
  Counterpoint: you reinstall something later and all your setting and preferences are still there. It’s a classic cloud vs disk debate about where and who should persist and own the data. Lately I think it’s kinda refreshing that it’s entirely on your disk and up to you.
cynicalsecurity 2mo ago
Oh, that's an article on macs. It's actually surreal to require a manual action to install a program.
cosmic_cheese 2mo ago
It makes more sense if one thinks of the disk image files as digital analogues to thumb drives, optical discs, etc. In the Classic Mac OS days a decent chunk of software (especially shareware/indieware) didn't have an installer and was just a folder you copied from a floppy disk or CD, which this process kinda mimics. You're just opening a file instead of putting in a disc.
- mpfh 2mo ago
  [dead]
- bigyabai 2mo ago
  Even Apple is unwilling to admit it makes sense, it's not like the App Store makes you drag the icon into a shopping cart or something. It's just poor design nowadays.
- epihelix 2mo ago
  The problem is that an application isn't intuitively analogous to removable media at all. The last time I physically inserted a disc to run an app was in the CD Rom era. The click-and-drag to the Applications folder step is also odd. Presumably the user wants to install the app if they've double-clicked it, so instead of kludgily hacking the file manager (oof!), why not simply prompt "Do you want to install [application name]?" [OK]/[Cancel]? How would that not be clearer? (Can you even install an app via the keyboard alone with that interface? I assume you must be able to, but it's certainly not intuitive that you could tab and enter your way to installation happiness.) I appreciate that TFA is all about the creativity that can be added to this step, but it seems to me to be poor UI/UX design to allow so many possible ways of doing something so fundamental as installing an application. Sure, it's cool and fun if you're young and creative; but likely confusing as all hell if you're older and less-computer-literate.
stevekerr 2mo ago
Why not .pkg (next, next, installer)? For the past week, I've been tweaking my startup's CLI to install as a .pkg, satisfy Apple signing, and everything that goes along with that. I've often wondered why so many companies opt for the icon method.
- cosmic_cheese 2mo ago
  As a user I don’t like installer packages as much because without special utilities, they’re opaque and it’s hard to tell what they’ll do. Of course copied binaries can cause plenty of trouble too, but I have much less of a reason to give an installed program admin privileges than I do an installer.
  - ianmurrays 2mo ago
    Same here. Especially because most installer packages rely on these specifically to install "obscure" things, so I'm immediately distrustful of them.
    - stevekerr 2mo ago
      That makes a lot of sense. With the icon method: The user is in full control. In our case, the CLI is part of a data sync system, so it does need a "special" once-per-hour check for new data (keeping local and mobile in sync). I've actually been surprised how strict Apple is before it will happily let signed code run. But the average user (including me previously) doesn't know that. I think trust comes down to being clear up front. Note to self: Add extra details/options to installer (WYSIWYG)
    - philistine 2mo ago
      I moved to the Mac App Store version of OneDrive specifically because of the constant issues with the background processes it insists it must have running at all times. The MAS version has only one of those and it works.
  - whstl 2mo ago
    I really dislike PKGs and I have bought an app called Pacifist app to specifically know what they're doing.
anArbitraryOne 2mo ago
I'll never forget the first time that dreadful window appeared. I was frustrated for 10min, eventually turning to my phone to search for what to do.
- Barbing 2mo ago
  Who says this doesn’t add to the discussion, come on! Voting you back up one… Also senior citizens might have no idea what they’re supposed to do with it, as I’ve seen, so could be more accessible. (Maybe that’s a feature if it’s a junk app.)
- lubujackson 2mo ago
  Happened to me last year. My wife always taunted me because I have been anti-Apple since they hermetically sealed their iMacs so you couldn't stick in RAM with talking to a "genius". "It just works!" she says. I dunno, I guess I didn't think an "Install" button needed reworking but here we are, not an ugly instruction or tooltip in sight. Also Apple: I bought my son an old refurbished iPad for watching Netflix on long drives. But you can't install Netflix! The OS is too old. What's the workaround? Simple, if you've previously installed a Netflix on another device you can "restore" it, and then Apple will let you install the old version. On the old OS. Of course I didn't have an old Netflix installation so I went to install Netflix on my work laptop, but there is no Netflix app for laptops anymore! Finally, I got it working through Family Share after an hour of tedious effort. This may be more Netflix's fault than Apple, but why would an OS give that power to a 3rd party in the first place? What sense does this make? It reminds me of NextJS where there is some minor niceties at the cost of magical thinking that you may need to move heaven and earth to circumvent in order to accomplish the most basic shit.
  - TylerE 2mo ago
    That should be your hint that the OS version is too old to be connecting to random services on the internet.
    - darkwater 2mo ago
jedbrooke 2mo ago
This is a nice little archive of all these different installers. I’d almost forgotten about all this madness since I’ve been using homebrew to install stuff for over a decade
nullbio 2mo ago
No one will ever convince me that the Mac approach for installing programs is intuitive or good UX. The whole argument of: "But if you think about it in ... way, it makes sense" is a terrible argument.
- TylerE 2mo ago
  No one will ever convince me that literally anything about Windows isn't utterly insane.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    How about running a program to set up another program, isn't that right, hahaha totally insane
    - TylerE 2mo ago
      Don't even get me started on the registry.
      - self_awareness 2mo ago
        How's registry different than ~/Library/Application Support?
        frollogaston 2mo ago
        It's not a directory tree you can just browse in the filesystem, it's a few database files. Idk much about Windows, but at first glance I like how you can browse the Windows registry all in one place without digging through other files.
        self_awareness 2mo ago
        But it has directories and files inside, right? It's only the program that is used to browse is different. It's like you don't use explorer but regedit. It's the only difference. On macOS it's not like you can always type what's inside the plist files with a text editor, sometimes you need to use 'plutil' anyway (if a plist is binary). So to browse Application Support you still often need thirdparty software anyway. Years ago I did a small project that mapped windows hive (registry) files as a filesystem through fuse on linux. It mapped to a filesystem concept nearly flawlessly. edit: can't reply anymore for today ('posting too fast'), so i just reply here: What is a file if not a key/value entry in a directory? Anyway, you can put custom binary data in registry, one value type is just "binary". But you shouldn't! Just like in Application Support - you can but you shouldn't. Registry just enforces it more. Entering regedit also requires to elevate it if you want to change system settings (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE). Changing user settings doesn't need elevation (HKEY_CURRENT_USER).
simplesocieties 2mo ago
I'll be honest given the article title I was hoping for a detailed rant on the complex installation process that most Windows apps hide, but this was also a nice read. And as a user of Raycast they do indeed have a very nice installation background.
adzm 2mo ago
I'm just glad I'm not the only one who says damage in their head for .dmg files
- nasretdinov 2mo ago
  I've once made a disk image backup of the running system (and it warn that it might be a good idea) and then wiped the laptop clean and installed a new macOS. The disk image (predictably) failed to mount and there wasn't much I could do to fix it. Since then I also read dmg as damage :)
dabinat 2mo ago
I think that if every app has to explain to the user how to use their own operating system, that operating system is not intuitive. I’ve been using Macs for a long time but I had to look up how to install an app the first time I did it.
- yndoendo 2mo ago
  Intuitive designs are nothing more that applying prior knowledge. I have to create simple next, next, finish instructions for people to install on Windows. Example of this would be the ability to open a can of soda. You can do it because you saw someone else do it. Now give the can to an Amazon tribe that never saw the can nor how to do it before. Windows uninstallers also do not clean up the system and leave trash everywhere. The registry is often the most litter filed area. Even Microsoft's _cleanmgr.exe_ does not fully clean your Temp folder and a manual removal is needed. As a user of a number of systems; Mac installation is the cleanest and most simple. Linux's closest would be AppImage packaged applications. Windows is one of the worst because often they are un-scriptable and require the end user to always interact. Mac and Linux can script their installations with ease. I'm saying this as someone that needs to manage systems which are air-gaped and service by others.
- somat 2mo ago
  The quote I like is "The only intuitive interface is the nipple, every other one has to be learned" So as long as an interface is consistent with prior interfaces I guess it is "intuitive" I have never used mac, but it sounds like a good interface to me, not the .dmg one, that one is. weird. but where the application is self constrained in it's own directory. The traditional unix method where the parts go according to their function (/bin /lib /share and all the /usr variants) is fine when all the software is system software(promotes reuse) and sort of works when you have a sys-admin whose job is to incorporate third-party software as system software(central package systems also fit this category), But it really starts to stink when you have independent third parties packaging their own software. Another way to think about it is what is the best hierarchy function/application or application/function
  - lostlogin 2mo ago
frollogaston 2mo ago
The dmg thing makes no sense. I do like that the app is self-contained, unlike Windows where it's always an installer, but don't like how deleting the app doesn't clear whatever files it put all over the place.
- pletnes 2mo ago
  Windows uninstall scripts often do the same. Some have an option of removing data files, some just leave them behind. I don’t have any statistics but I see no reason to believe the situation is any «better» on windows. Also, I am sure people will disagree on whether it is better to remove data files or leave them.
  - frollogaston 2mo ago
    Not surprising, but at least devs are given a clear way to behave well if they want. I do think all desktop operating systems were overly loose with apps touching files, though.
    - pletnes 2mo ago
      Also, desktop app devs tend to touch files in a myriad places that you’d never expect. The os can never solve that anyway.
      - frollogaston 2mo ago
        It could solve that if they wanted to make it like iOS apps by default, and only go outside that for less common situations like dev tools. I kinda expected Mac App Store apps to be fully sandboxed that way, not the partial thing we have.
      - eviks 2mo ago
        Of course it can, that's what sandboxes are for
- the_other 2mo ago
wilg 2mo ago
It's truly a terrible UX decision that Apple's left in place because of apathy. (And presumably thinking someone wants to install software through the Mac App Store!?) They should offer a first-class way of "installing downloaded apps" and push developers to use it. I would say use an Installer package but I can't remember if there's issues with it not being a single file. So a zipped installer package. And then make that not have an unnecessary 12 step wizard.
- frollogaston 2mo ago
  They do list .zip as one recommended way: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/packaging-mac-software-for-distribution https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/packaging-ma... But .dmg is also listed as a way to sign the whole thing.
- prakrin 2mo ago
  [flagged]
jocoda 2mo ago
FYI - You don't have to drag the app to the applications folder in the install window. You can drag the app to a different location. I have an entry level mini 8GB/255 GB SSD with 1TB external SSD. Everything goes on the external. There are only a handful of apps that insist on being installed in the system Application folder. Even had xCode running on the external. Uninstalling is supposed to be as simple as moving the app to trash but often that leaves a load of stuff behind that no one tells you about.
- wpm 2mo ago
  Uninstalling has the same issue on every OS because the OS isn't keeping a log of every file an application creates over its lifetime being installed; it can only remove what it knows about.
  - pas 2mo ago
    in the age of containers, overlay filesystems, a decade of UX work regarding sharing data/files/content between applications on phones, it should.
  - pathartl 2mo ago
    In Windows this is currently being transformed with MSIX... Whenever that gets a foothold that is. But this is also why it was expected that you were to bundle an uninstaller with your application. It was expected that the developer was to handle cleanup. Obviously too many developers cut corners. The only way around this really is to have a system-wide hook that tracks what files an executable touches, and then have that executable registered to an overall application definition. It's never going to be perfect. You can be really anal about it where you end up with iOS where, yes, you can sleep pretty well knowing that when you delete an app it has cleaned up after itself. The obvious tradeoff being that it's inherently limiting the scope of what you can do with the app. I think it's gotten much better in recent years for the Windows crowd. I've been running the same install of 11 for about two years now. Back in the XP days I'd be lucky to be able to make it 6 months without feeling like everything was incredibly bogged down with no way out.
  - 2mo ago
ExoticPearTree 2mo ago
Counterpoint: as a Mac user it is surreal to click Next Next Next to install a program on Windows. Same for uninstalling. Move to Trash and poof, unistalled. There is no standard way to install stuff, so neither MacOS nor Windows deviates from something. For all the bickering about it here in the comments, no one proposed an “ideal” solution to install a program on Mac.
- IshKebab 2mo ago
  At least with Windows it's always clear what to do. Mac can dump you in a finder window with two icons. Very unclear. You may have forgotten how unclear this can be for the first time.
  - hahn-kev 2mo ago
    I grew up using windows and the first time I ran into that on the Mac I think I had to Google what to do.
    - justsomehnguy 2mo ago
      In my first time I needed like the whole 10 minutes to find where the system settings are.
- mschuster91 2mo ago
  Mac stuff can leave stuff ghosting around. Launch agents, helper tools installed into the Unix filesystem, configuration and cache files. A myriad of „uninstallers“ exist but these are all third party and rely on crowd wisdom.
- frollogaston 2mo ago
  Ideal solution: download .app inside .zip. Double-clicking expands it into /Applications, deletes the zip, and opens the app, which is not far from what regular zips do. Or xip if they want signing. The Windows way is inherently clearer than what Mac does now. You always open what it gives you, and you don't need to be told to do anything else. Also, move to trash doesn't exactly uninstall a Mac app right now.
IshKebab 2mo ago
Yeah I remember the first time I had to figure this out. Absolutely incomprehensible, depending on the app you get. A lot of open source apps don't bother with a custom background and just have the two icons. Even if there's an arrow it's hardly clear if you're used to saner installation methods. For a company that is supposed to be all about ease of use, this one is absurd. And if you're wondering what Apple should do, if a .dmg file contains only an app and a link to Applications (or maybe some new flag set), when you double click it it should say something like "Do you want to install this app [Install] [Inspect disk image contents]". Very very simple.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
PufPufPuf 2mo ago
When I first got a Macbook, I tried installing an app and had no idea what to do once I saw the app icon, arrow and Applications folder with no additional instructions. I didn't figure it out and had to look it up. For an ecosystem praised for its "user friendliness", this was certainly not the best first impression.
- raffael_de 2mo ago
  As someone who grew up with Windows the canonical equivalent action would have been to select "install" from the dmg file's context menu (which is opened by a right click). The MacOS way to do it feels too gimmicky and different-for-being-different's sake ...
  - redeeman 2mo ago
    well.. its not like they were hiding it when they said "think differently"
    - Schiendelman 2mo ago
      They said "think different" - intentionally not using the adverb, to be different!
  - frollogaston 2mo ago
    They weren't just trying to be different with Mac, more like it's an outdated part of the system. It made more sense when software was often on CDs or floppies, cause a disk image is a virtual version of that, and that was a nice feature Mac OS had for a long time that Windows didn't. But now it's like the save icon still being a floppy disk in 2026.
isoprophlex 2mo ago
You get the program image from the web and you move it into your folder holding application?! Having some custom wizard that's never the same fuck up your entire windows registry, write to wherever the fuck it wants on disk, now THAT is surreal
jiehong 2mo ago
I might be in the minority, but for me the best way is installing with a cli (like homebrew or winget on windows). A UI way to install is only a fallback.
bni 2mo ago
This is one of my favorite things with the Mac. I feel it is very intuitive me moving the app to Applications, then just move it to trash if it sucks and it is completely gone. setup.exe .pkg installers make me feel dirty because I hav enough control over how it will fuck up my system or not.
- krackers 2mo ago
  I think most of the complexity is around the concept of disk images. If the app was just distributed in a zip file (like many in fact are) then you just unzip it, and the application is right there. You can move it to /Applications if you want (and many apps offer this) but it's not necessary. Disk images seem to be much rarer on other platforms, and are usually only used for images of optical disks. Even the concept of "ejection" can be confusing, especially since when mounted disk images appear almost identical to actual physical removable media. I'd like to hear the reasoning behind why mounting disk images isn't relegated to a vestigal "power user" feature by now, since it seems like zip files (especially in appledouble format) can serve the same needs for most normal user flows.
- jeroenhd 2mo ago
  The app icon approach only give the illusion of control. That may be worth something too, but whether you run a .pkg or a program, the app developer can do whatever they want with the permissions you grant it. There is an advantage to being able to move a program to any locations and run it from there, and while the same can easily be done on Windows (just make one big .exe!), it's not expected for users to just move install directories around. That said, programs break the same way: configuration pointing at wrong directories, permissions going wacky, you name it. It just seems to go wrong less often on macOS because of developer expectations.
- eviks 2mo ago
  The moving step is not intuitive, read other comments, it's also redundant in a better designed system. And of course it's not completely gone, but leaves plenty of garbage behind. And of course you have no control over it
t43562 2mo ago
A long while ago I found myself helping out with some products MSI installer. I don't think anyone can really point a finger at the Mac and accuse it of having issues by comparison with what seemed to me to be the nightmare from hell of trying to make an installer that would work on various versions of windows. It's not the fault of MSI per se, although its concept seems utterly frightful to me, but the way DLLs work and are registered and where you have to install them etc. When your app requires an older or newer MSVCRT etc. Also...the registry...something else that makes good old UNIX text file editing seem good to me. I always thought that libsomelibrary.so.MAJORVERSION.MINORVERSION with symbolic links from libsomelibrary.so.MAJORVERSION and libsomelibrary.so allowed one to create dependencies that made sense - more or less specific as you chose. It also allows different versions of the same library to exist in the same directory such that one is less likely to break existing software when installing something newer (or older). To be fair it might just be the way Windows tries to keep compatibility for the ages that makes it super difficult. I do think that you tend to get similar outcomes from similar assumptions/requirements and compatibility was indeed very very important till the internet became good enough to offer everyone easy upgrades. I'm not a big snap or flatpack fan but DMG seems rather in their class - making things simpler. It might be easy to run an MSI after someone has burned many hours testing it to get it to work everywhere but to me it's a non-simple architecture that is made to work by extreme effort. I'd rather a simpler architecture that open source packagers could manage more easily. As an example, I tried creating an Ubuntu package recently - a plugin for GNU Make that adds some useful functions.....that was SO hard - worse than any MSI experience I ever had - and I gave up. There were millions of confusing instructions and none worked properly. I couldn't work out which way was up or down - I don't know how people do it. On Artix (an OS which is a little harder to install than Ubuntu) it is an absolute dream to create packages - exceedingly so. It might be that they aren't the greatest packages in the world but something that can be developed easily and got working can also be improved easily.
- jeroenhd 2mo ago
  Windows' CRT setup allows for binary compatibility with older versions. You can go without if you just statically compile the dependencies into your program, but many Windows developers choose to rely on runtime versions which may or may not be shared. MSI's biggest mistake was probably granting developers the capability of invoking any program they like. The format was originally designed similar to Linux packages. Installation steps were atomic and reversible. If something went wrong (i.e. you ran out of disk space halfway through), the installer can undo every change step by step so you can try again later without overwrite prompts. Unfortunately, adding the ability to call executables means that atomicity is usually lost. macOS applications seem to just package every single DLL they need inside of their application folder rather than relying on the OS. I'd do the same if I were developing for macOS with how often Apple likes to make breaking changes. The symlinking trick for .so files often breaks on Linux. Method parameters change, structs get altered, and you can quickly create working-but-unstable versions if you have a different version of the same program. The Windows way, used by Flatpak and Snap, of targetting known-good sets of libraries will work around that. The macOS way (AppImage) also works but doesn't allow for deduplication. It might, if the AppImage would be uncompressed and files would be extent-aligned on a modern file system, but in practice that won't happen. In theory, Windows and Linux offer the same app installation flow as macOS. AppImage and huge .exe files can be moved around and deleted just as easily. Windows will let you do all kinds of things with desktop.ini, including custom folder backgrounds, and its native .iso support can offer a very similar mount-then-delete flow to .DMG files.
vintagedave 2mo ago
That Squirrel screenshot is fascinating: what happened to the traffic light controls? https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/as-a-windows-user-its-a-very-surreal-way-to-install-a-program/32.2096w.avif https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/as-a-windows-user-its-a-v...
- krackers 2mo ago
  Probably someone installed a custom theme (you could do it on osx back in the day, see e.g. "Aqua Extreme").
vintagedave 2mo ago
There are some amazing graphics here. These are images users would see very rarely: usually only on the initial installation. (A Sparkle app update would usually run for the rest of the app's lifetime.) The amount of care and polish put into something the user would see only once really shows the change in attitude around apps and UI on the Mac today. macOS is on the surface the same. But seeing this causes a feeling of a deep gulf. How can we or Apple regain it? That special sense of value and care in the OS and its app developers?
pavlov 2mo ago
I think the most confusing concept in this process for new users is the shortcut inside the disk image because it breaks the isolation metaphor. So, you download a file, and it's something called an "image" which opens in Finder like you'd inserted an external thumb drive. Fine. You open the image, and inside is... Your own Applications folder? Wait, how can the file I downloaded contain all of my apps? This kind of indirection is natural to developers and other advanced users: the file you got from the internet doesn't really know about your Applications, it's a link to a generic system location that gets resolved by Finder. But for less advanced users it's oddly circular: this virtual disk that came from the internet has my data in it. It's something that never happens with an actual thumb drive.
- jeroenhd 2mo ago
  There's a tiny little arrow in the corner to indicate that it's a shortcut. But this really confused me when I first started using macOS as well. You're just expected to know that the applications folder in the disk image you just downloaded isn't actually inside of the disk image. When I first opened a .dmg, I thought the arrow symbolised some kind of progress bar and waited for a moment to let it do its installation. That didn't work, so I copy-pasted the folder into my Applications folder manually. When I later opened a different .dmg that had instructions about how I needed to drag and drop myself, I actually realised what I needed to do.
  - ffsm8 2mo ago
    i actually vividly remember when they started introducing that flow... the first time i came across it was a total knee-jerk negative reaction. unrelated to that, i switched to windows a few years later (my old imac wasnt good enough to play world of warcraft)... but when i came back to it 10+ years later, it still felt strange. i mean its neat from a minimalism perspective, but the decision to not ship with a regular installation UI in OG macOS X came with the tradeoff of not cleanly _uninstalling_ software either. config files etc were always left over. but i guess - as Apple keeps locking down good old macOS X in favour of forcing software to go through the Apple Store this is going away as a sideeffect?
gushie 2mo ago
I've been using a Mac for 4 years. I still just want a nice simple install button.
mig39 2mo ago
It's a disk image, because in the old days, you'd install apps by dragging them from a floppy or CD to the Applications folder.
dgellow 2mo ago
Really nice collection! Seeing Adium makes me nostalgic
Kim_Bruning 2mo ago
It really depends what you grew up with I guess. As someone originally coming off of RISC OS[1] way back when, the mac way is closer to intuitive than the windows way, while Linux's approach of splitting files across the entire FS so that you can't possibly find all of them is "The Real WTF". (Nixos is even further from that original intuition in a lot of ways. Oh for the days of drag-dropping the !App dir to wherever you happen to have space; and maybe dragging it to !menon if you needed to actually find it back ) [1] The operating system that came with a thin welcome booklet with reassuring pencil art explaining how to hold a mouse, and what the difference between a click and a doubleclick was. [2] [2] https://archive.org/details/risc-os-5.28-user-guide/page/6/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/risc-os-5.28-user-guide/page/6/m... Oh wow, still exists in the RISC OS 5 manual. This kind of manual used to be famed : Eg. Chapter 1 introduces what a desktop is; Chapter 2 explains the mouse; 3 Explains the keyboard ; 4 explains what a window is. Give a motivated naive user this guide and there's a small chance they might actually grok the thing when they're done.
- benj111 2mo ago
  Agreed with the Linux thing. We have multiple different bin folders still, because some hard drive on a PDP 11 wasn't big enough?!? On the other hand it has package management so you don't have to worry about it so much.
  - Ferret7446 2mo ago
    Mainstream Linux distros got rid of the bin split many years ago.
    - fragmede 2mo ago
      and then Nix came out, and went running off in the other direction as fast as it could!
- BerislavLopac 2mo ago
  And this is also the reason why Mac is doing it this way. One of the big goals in development of MacOS X was to keep the experience consistent with the old Macintosh OS 9.x, even though it was based on a completely different paradigm (Unix). And the UX of Macintosh basically developed along with its paradigms, because in many ways it was the first popular OS that widely accepted the things, like windows, menus, trash and the like.
amaccuish 2mo ago
Before we I introduced an MDM at work, I can tell you, 80% of users were running apps from .dmgs from their desktop. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if that means the process is "intuitive".
phtrivier 2mo ago
Unrelated, but the gallery of "drag icon to Applications" contains a screenshot of Joost : does anyone remember that ? It could have been Netflix or Youtube a decade before, if only there had been, you know, any good show to watch on it. That was the first "mass market" piece of software I worked on, a good 20 years ago now, and it brings some memories of ye old time...
kingkongjaffa 2mo ago
As a omni user of Linux, OSx and Windows, the most peculiar part to me is this: > teaches you that the app is just a file that you can place anywhere, or trash when done. It's actually kind of opaque and not obvious at all, how exactly to uninstall apps on a Mac.
TZubiri 2mo ago
I'm also a windows user, along with user of other OS. What's surreal to me is the Windows Installation process, the concept of an installation process that allows any app to have complete unsandboxed access to the files of other applications. In the year 2026 At first the idea of dragging a file seemed unnecessary, I would have thought it's better for the installer to do that automatically, but now I understand that the user is in control, and the best installation mechanism is not the one with less clicks, users are expected to grant permissions to applications they control, and in this case they are showing the user where those files are, and that the installation is nothing more than moving a folder around.
kzrdude 2mo ago
As a mac user (also a linux user), I got used to it and it always seemed better than the alternative (weird install programs).
magic_hamster 2mo ago
After spending years with the major OS families, I think that Linux is the only one which had the right ideas and was able to keep an efficient solution working for decades. Brew and other MacOS package managers are a testament to this. Package managers crafted with care around the user needs is always going to be the way to go. This highlights something that's been a creeping issue for at least a decade if not longer: both MacOS and Windows are not built around the user anymore, for different reasons. Windows is easy to see, it is now an OS as a service where the user is exploited right below the comfort threshold that will make them abandon the system (although for many this threshold was crossed long ago). For Apple it's not as immediately obvious, but their forced obsolescence through constantly shifting requirements and tooling means that nothing lasts very long in the Mac ecosystem, you always have to upgrade, as a consumer and as a developer, rebuild, refactor, push updates and eventually be forced to replace your hardware. So you are basically caught in a neverending game of catchup and Apple is always a step ahead of you, by design. Booting up almost any flavor of Linux is just leagues ahead in terms of simply letting you use your computer tending to your needs.
pbrum 2mo ago
Fantastic work by the compiler/author, and lovely work by all those developers and designers through the years. Great contribution to HN
Razengan 2mo ago
As someone who started on Windows then went to Macs, I always and still find the "installer" method absolutely horrid. Why do I have to run an app before I can run an app?? Why do they all look different? Why do most of them insist on shoving other crap into my computer?? Copying a prepackaged bundle is the more intuitive way: You take something from outside and you bring it into your house/put it on your desk. And then deleting it when you're done (leftover settings files being an optional "pro" step) Let's not even talk about how "Alt+F4" remotely evokes "close/quit" and other weird shit Windowsers assume is normal.
disposition2 2mo ago
It’s neat the amount of care and thought that used to go into just an icon or a one off dmg background screen. I can remember styling my Windows XP and Linux machine back in the day, I didn’t have the money to afford a Mac but I could make my machine look like one or even nicer than Aqua, and it was all because the many great artists freely sharing their works (like Louie Mantia mentioned in the article). So many great artists on Neowin and AquaSoft, I believe some even went to work for Apple. Cool article, thanks for sharing.
ifh-hn 2mo ago
I'm not a Mac user, and have no.comment about the drag to application folder thing. But as a Linux and windows user, I always liked how windows could have portable apps. These dmg files seem similar to having a portable app. Back in the day I had a usb with my favourite apps and distros on it. I might be wrong since I've never used a Mac before.
- d3Xt3r 2mo ago
  > I always liked how windows could have portable apps. Linux has portable apps too - AppImages and static binaries. As for Macs, dmg files are not apps, they're just archives like zip files. The apps go inside the dmg files. And these "apps" are actually just plain old folders with extra metadata that makes macOS treat it like it was an executable. But you can infact navigate to the inside of an app if you use the terminal, like you can literally `cd` to it and treat it like a folder that it is.
  - andai 2mo ago
    Linux has portable apps too — the windows ones ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624
gurumeditations 2mo ago
Using my Mac as a lifelong Windows user has given me new appreciation for the elegant logical design of Windows 7 and XP. It’s clear the Mac is full of bizarre retrograde UX choices leftover from the original Macintoshes in the 80s and the only reason I can kind of figure out using it now is because I grew up with iOS as well which has been cannonballed into the old workings of macOS over the years. Clearly Apple never gave a damn about fixing macOS until recently probably because it was the same handful of people using it for the past 40 years.
justsomehnguy 2mo ago
AKA tech support nightmare. But I want to shout out for the way the progress bar of the video was made - I hate disappearing ones, but at least it doesn't obscure the content itself! It's still mind boggling what the video controls in 2026 are treated like Flash ActiveX iframe.
de6u99er 2mo ago
When you look at an application in your Applications folder (like Safari or Microsoft Word), macOS makes it look and act like a single file or icon. But if you were to right-click (or control-click) on that app and select "Show Package Contents", you would see the truth: it is actually a folder structure.
- frollogaston 2mo ago
  I'm guessing this is why Mac apps tend to be more self-contained while Windows ones like to be installed. An exe can have resource files archived into it, but it'd probably be inefficient to run the program off that.
Self-Perfection 2mo ago
6 years ago at a new job I was forced to use provided Mac laptop. Never used MacOS before. So first thing first: get Firefox. Managed to download .dmg file. Double clicked it. And now I see utterly confusing window with an image that tells me that I need to move downloaded Firefox to applications to use it. Where I am supposed to get the thing that I need to move? Totally not clear that the icon in this window is interactive and can be dragged. Why can not it do this thing by itself? At which point association with handling http links will be configured and whom? How am I supposed to figure out that dmg is like a zip archive? I was completely lost until colleague showed me what I was supposed to do. I burst into laughter when he showed me. I don't think he understood why.
northisup 2mo ago
I always assume an app that uses an installer is hiding something from me.
- andai 2mo ago
  In my experience, an app that doesn't use an uninstaller is giving me the gift of hunting for hidden treasure all over my hard drive.
andai 2mo ago
I'm confused by the title. I expected the article to be about the title, i.e. a windows user's perspective here, but this doesn't appear to be mentioned at all. It's also quoted, so I thought it was referring to some other post somewhere, but there's nothing about that either. Is the author quoting himself? Other than that, I found this to be a great article.

245 points by allenc 2mo ago

I’ve always appreciated the effort and creativity developers put into making this a good experience, and a learning experience for new users. After all, you never know which app will be someone’s first install. A well made dmg was how I learned to install apps on OS X when I first moved to it 23 years ago. Some developers have gotten lazy with this and expect users to just know. As a result I’ve seen many people running an app out of the dmg file itself for a long time, then they wonder why they have a bunch of stuff mounted.

smallerize 2mo ago

Is the quote in the title a reference to something?

allenc 2mo ago
Yeah, it's about how Windows has .msi installers, whereas for MacOS it's a .dmg where you copy the exec binary (which itself is a folder) into the /Applications folder.
- smallerize 2mo ago
  Ok but who said the quote?
  - mrunkel 2mo ago
    It’s in TFA, but the post title is without the “very”
    - smallerize 2mo ago
      In a gray-on-gray footnote with no name and no direct link. Got it. https://bsky.app/profile/beetlenaut.bsky.social/post/3ml36n5zfks24 https://bsky.app/profile/beetlenaut.bsky.social/post/3ml36n5...
- jackjeff 2mo ago
  Or any folder. Most of my apps are in sub folders organized by category. :)
- TylerE 2mo ago
  Apples and Oranges. MSI compares to .pkg (eww) installers on the mac side, not .dmg.

NordStreamYacht 2mo ago

Macs are fun.

photios 2mo ago
Too bad nobody needs to eject a floppy disk anymore :D

herf 2mo ago

It's fine for installing, but uninstalling is madness: Windows uninstallers try to clean up all the registry and user profile stuff they install. Mac apps seem to just leave stuff behind in Local Settings or Caches forever? Containers are not such a bad idea.

sd9 2mo ago
I agree entirely, my Mac is full of half leftover data from old apps. But that is quite independent from the creativity people show in these install workflows. You could have both a cool .dmg and a proper uninstallation process (but we don’t, for the most part).
SanjayMehta 2mo ago
I bought AppZapper years ago, and it still works. There's a free tool out there somewhere as well. Don't knock on this feature, it can be a lifesaver if you've lost the license info. When you reinstall, sometimes the app can retrieve the license from old files.
- Barbing 2mo ago
  >free tool https://github.com/alienator88/Pearcleaner https://github.com/alienator88/Pearcleaner >if you've lost the license info Or used up your free trial, you get a reminder it’s time to buy!
card_zero 2mo ago
I switched to Windows in the year 2000, or 2002, around then. It used to be cool because "the app is just a file that you can place anywhere, or trash when done" was true. They arrived usually as Stuffit or Binhex archives, rarely as disk images. There was no fussy "applications folder" with special permissions. You decompressed the file to anywhere and ran it. If you felt like updating something, this was accomplished by going and getting a new one.
JoeSloth 2mo ago
Counterpoint: you reinstall something later and all your setting and preferences are still there. It’s a classic cloud vs disk debate about where and who should persist and own the data. Lately I think it’s kinda refreshing that it’s entirely on your disk and up to you.

cynicalsecurity 2mo ago

Oh, that's an article on macs. It's actually surreal to require a manual action to install a program.

cosmic_cheese 2mo ago

It makes more sense if one thinks of the disk image files as digital analogues to thumb drives, optical discs, etc. In the Classic Mac OS days a decent chunk of software (especially shareware/indieware) didn't have an installer and was just a folder you copied from a floppy disk or CD, which this process kinda mimics. You're just opening a file instead of putting in a disc.

mpfh 2mo ago
[dead]
bigyabai 2mo ago
Even Apple is unwilling to admit it makes sense, it's not like the App Store makes you drag the icon into a shopping cart or something. It's just poor design nowadays.
epihelix 2mo ago
The problem is that an application isn't intuitively analogous to removable media at all. The last time I physically inserted a disc to run an app was in the CD Rom era. The click-and-drag to the Applications folder step is also odd. Presumably the user wants to install the app if they've double-clicked it, so instead of kludgily hacking the file manager (oof!), why not simply prompt "Do you want to install [application name]?" [OK]/[Cancel]? How would that not be clearer? (Can you even install an app via the keyboard alone with that interface? I assume you must be able to, but it's certainly not intuitive that you could tab and enter your way to installation happiness.) I appreciate that TFA is all about the creativity that can be added to this step, but it seems to me to be poor UI/UX design to allow so many possible ways of doing something so fundamental as installing an application. Sure, it's cool and fun if you're young and creative; but likely confusing as all hell if you're older and less-computer-literate.

stevekerr 2mo ago

Why not .pkg (next, next, installer)? For the past week, I've been tweaking my startup's CLI to install as a .pkg, satisfy Apple signing, and everything that goes along with that. I've often wondered why so many companies opt for the icon method.

cosmic_cheese 2mo ago
As a user I don’t like installer packages as much because without special utilities, they’re opaque and it’s hard to tell what they’ll do. Of course copied binaries can cause plenty of trouble too, but I have much less of a reason to give an installed program admin privileges than I do an installer.
- ianmurrays 2mo ago
  Same here. Especially because most installer packages rely on these specifically to install "obscure" things, so I'm immediately distrustful of them.
  - stevekerr 2mo ago
    That makes a lot of sense. With the icon method: The user is in full control. In our case, the CLI is part of a data sync system, so it does need a "special" once-per-hour check for new data (keeping local and mobile in sync). I've actually been surprised how strict Apple is before it will happily let signed code run. But the average user (including me previously) doesn't know that. I think trust comes down to being clear up front. Note to self: Add extra details/options to installer (WYSIWYG)
  - philistine 2mo ago
    I moved to the Mac App Store version of OneDrive specifically because of the constant issues with the background processes it insists it must have running at all times. The MAS version has only one of those and it works.
- whstl 2mo ago
  I really dislike PKGs and I have bought an app called Pacifist app to specifically know what they're doing.

anArbitraryOne 2mo ago

I'll never forget the first time that dreadful window appeared. I was frustrated for 10min, eventually turning to my phone to search for what to do.

Barbing 2mo ago
Who says this doesn’t add to the discussion, come on! Voting you back up one… Also senior citizens might have no idea what they’re supposed to do with it, as I’ve seen, so could be more accessible. (Maybe that’s a feature if it’s a junk app.)
lubujackson 2mo ago
Happened to me last year. My wife always taunted me because I have been anti-Apple since they hermetically sealed their iMacs so you couldn't stick in RAM with talking to a "genius". "It just works!" she says. I dunno, I guess I didn't think an "Install" button needed reworking but here we are, not an ugly instruction or tooltip in sight. Also Apple: I bought my son an old refurbished iPad for watching Netflix on long drives. But you can't install Netflix! The OS is too old. What's the workaround? Simple, if you've previously installed a Netflix on another device you can "restore" it, and then Apple will let you install the old version. On the old OS. Of course I didn't have an old Netflix installation so I went to install Netflix on my work laptop, but there is no Netflix app for laptops anymore! Finally, I got it working through Family Share after an hour of tedious effort. This may be more Netflix's fault than Apple, but why would an OS give that power to a 3rd party in the first place? What sense does this make? It reminds me of NextJS where there is some minor niceties at the cost of magical thinking that you may need to move heaven and earth to circumvent in order to accomplish the most basic shit.
- TylerE 2mo ago
  That should be your hint that the OS version is too old to be connecting to random services on the internet.
  - darkwater 2mo ago

jedbrooke 2mo ago

This is a nice little archive of all these different installers. I’d almost forgotten about all this madness since I’ve been using homebrew to install stuff for over a decade

nullbio 2mo ago

No one will ever convince me that the Mac approach for installing programs is intuitive or good UX. The whole argument of: "But if you think about it in ... way, it makes sense" is a terrible argument.

TylerE 2mo ago
No one will ever convince me that literally anything about Windows isn't utterly insane.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  How about running a program to set up another program, isn't that right, hahaha totally insane
  - TylerE 2mo ago
    Don't even get me started on the registry.
    - self_awareness 2mo ago
      How's registry different than ~/Library/Application Support?
      - frollogaston 2mo ago
        It's not a directory tree you can just browse in the filesystem, it's a few database files. Idk much about Windows, but at first glance I like how you can browse the Windows registry all in one place without digging through other files.
        self_awareness 2mo ago
        But it has directories and files inside, right? It's only the program that is used to browse is different. It's like you don't use explorer but regedit. It's the only difference. On macOS it's not like you can always type what's inside the plist files with a text editor, sometimes you need to use 'plutil' anyway (if a plist is binary). So to browse Application Support you still often need thirdparty software anyway. Years ago I did a small project that mapped windows hive (registry) files as a filesystem through fuse on linux. It mapped to a filesystem concept nearly flawlessly. edit: can't reply anymore for today ('posting too fast'), so i just reply here: What is a file if not a key/value entry in a directory? Anyway, you can put custom binary data in registry, one value type is just "binary". But you shouldn't! Just like in Application Support - you can but you shouldn't. Registry just enforces it more. Entering regedit also requires to elevate it if you want to change system settings (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE). Changing user settings doesn't need elevation (HKEY_CURRENT_USER).

simplesocieties 2mo ago

I'll be honest given the article title I was hoping for a detailed rant on the complex installation process that most Windows apps hide, but this was also a nice read. And as a user of Raycast they do indeed have a very nice installation background.

adzm 2mo ago

I'm just glad I'm not the only one who says damage in their head for .dmg files

nasretdinov 2mo ago
I've once made a disk image backup of the running system (and it warn that it might be a good idea) and then wiped the laptop clean and installed a new macOS. The disk image (predictably) failed to mount and there wasn't much I could do to fix it. Since then I also read dmg as damage :)

dabinat 2mo ago

I think that if every app has to explain to the user how to use their own operating system, that operating system is not intuitive. I’ve been using Macs for a long time but I had to look up how to install an app the first time I did it.

yndoendo 2mo ago
Intuitive designs are nothing more that applying prior knowledge. I have to create simple next, next, finish instructions for people to install on Windows. Example of this would be the ability to open a can of soda. You can do it because you saw someone else do it. Now give the can to an Amazon tribe that never saw the can nor how to do it before. Windows uninstallers also do not clean up the system and leave trash everywhere. The registry is often the most litter filed area. Even Microsoft's _cleanmgr.exe_ does not fully clean your Temp folder and a manual removal is needed. As a user of a number of systems; Mac installation is the cleanest and most simple. Linux's closest would be AppImage packaged applications. Windows is one of the worst because often they are un-scriptable and require the end user to always interact. Mac and Linux can script their installations with ease. I'm saying this as someone that needs to manage systems which are air-gaped and service by others.
somat 2mo ago
The quote I like is "The only intuitive interface is the nipple, every other one has to be learned" So as long as an interface is consistent with prior interfaces I guess it is "intuitive" I have never used mac, but it sounds like a good interface to me, not the .dmg one, that one is. weird. but where the application is self constrained in it's own directory. The traditional unix method where the parts go according to their function (/bin /lib /share and all the /usr variants) is fine when all the software is system software(promotes reuse) and sort of works when you have a sys-admin whose job is to incorporate third-party software as system software(central package systems also fit this category), But it really starts to stink when you have independent third parties packaging their own software. Another way to think about it is what is the best hierarchy function/application or application/function
- lostlogin 2mo ago

frollogaston 2mo ago

The dmg thing makes no sense. I do like that the app is self-contained, unlike Windows where it's always an installer, but don't like how deleting the app doesn't clear whatever files it put all over the place.

pletnes 2mo ago
Windows uninstall scripts often do the same. Some have an option of removing data files, some just leave them behind. I don’t have any statistics but I see no reason to believe the situation is any «better» on windows. Also, I am sure people will disagree on whether it is better to remove data files or leave them.
- frollogaston 2mo ago
  Not surprising, but at least devs are given a clear way to behave well if they want. I do think all desktop operating systems were overly loose with apps touching files, though.
  - pletnes 2mo ago
    Also, desktop app devs tend to touch files in a myriad places that you’d never expect. The os can never solve that anyway.
    - frollogaston 2mo ago
      It could solve that if they wanted to make it like iOS apps by default, and only go outside that for less common situations like dev tools. I kinda expected Mac App Store apps to be fully sandboxed that way, not the partial thing we have.
    - eviks 2mo ago
      Of course it can, that's what sandboxes are for
the_other 2mo ago

wilg 2mo ago

It's truly a terrible UX decision that Apple's left in place because of apathy. (And presumably thinking someone wants to install software through the Mac App Store!?) They should offer a first-class way of "installing downloaded apps" and push developers to use it. I would say use an Installer package but I can't remember if there's issues with it not being a single file. So a zipped installer package. And then make that not have an unnecessary 12 step wizard.

frollogaston 2mo ago
They do list .zip as one recommended way: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/packaging-mac-software-for-distribution https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/packaging-ma... But .dmg is also listed as a way to sign the whole thing.
prakrin 2mo ago
[flagged]

jocoda 2mo ago

FYI - You don't have to drag the app to the applications folder in the install window. You can drag the app to a different location. I have an entry level mini 8GB/255 GB SSD with 1TB external SSD. Everything goes on the external. There are only a handful of apps that insist on being installed in the system Application folder. Even had xCode running on the external. Uninstalling is supposed to be as simple as moving the app to trash but often that leaves a load of stuff behind that no one tells you about.

wpm 2mo ago
Uninstalling has the same issue on every OS because the OS isn't keeping a log of every file an application creates over its lifetime being installed; it can only remove what it knows about.
- pas 2mo ago
  in the age of containers, overlay filesystems, a decade of UX work regarding sharing data/files/content between applications on phones, it should.
- pathartl 2mo ago
  In Windows this is currently being transformed with MSIX... Whenever that gets a foothold that is. But this is also why it was expected that you were to bundle an uninstaller with your application. It was expected that the developer was to handle cleanup. Obviously too many developers cut corners. The only way around this really is to have a system-wide hook that tracks what files an executable touches, and then have that executable registered to an overall application definition. It's never going to be perfect. You can be really anal about it where you end up with iOS where, yes, you can sleep pretty well knowing that when you delete an app it has cleaned up after itself. The obvious tradeoff being that it's inherently limiting the scope of what you can do with the app. I think it's gotten much better in recent years for the Windows crowd. I've been running the same install of 11 for about two years now. Back in the XP days I'd be lucky to be able to make it 6 months without feeling like everything was incredibly bogged down with no way out.
- 2mo ago

ExoticPearTree 2mo ago

Counterpoint: as a Mac user it is surreal to click Next Next Next to install a program on Windows. Same for uninstalling. Move to Trash and poof, unistalled. There is no standard way to install stuff, so neither MacOS nor Windows deviates from something. For all the bickering about it here in the comments, no one proposed an “ideal” solution to install a program on Mac.

IshKebab 2mo ago
At least with Windows it's always clear what to do. Mac can dump you in a finder window with two icons. Very unclear. You may have forgotten how unclear this can be for the first time.
- hahn-kev 2mo ago
  I grew up using windows and the first time I ran into that on the Mac I think I had to Google what to do.
  - justsomehnguy 2mo ago
    In my first time I needed like the whole 10 minutes to find where the system settings are.
mschuster91 2mo ago
Mac stuff can leave stuff ghosting around. Launch agents, helper tools installed into the Unix filesystem, configuration and cache files. A myriad of „uninstallers“ exist but these are all third party and rely on crowd wisdom.
frollogaston 2mo ago
Ideal solution: download .app inside .zip. Double-clicking expands it into /Applications, deletes the zip, and opens the app, which is not far from what regular zips do. Or xip if they want signing. The Windows way is inherently clearer than what Mac does now. You always open what it gives you, and you don't need to be told to do anything else. Also, move to trash doesn't exactly uninstall a Mac app right now.

IshKebab 2mo ago

Yeah I remember the first time I had to figure this out. Absolutely incomprehensible, depending on the app you get. A lot of open source apps don't bother with a custom background and just have the two icons. Even if there's an arrow it's hardly clear if you're used to saner installation methods. For a company that is supposed to be all about ease of use, this one is absurd. And if you're wondering what Apple should do, if a .dmg file contains only an app and a link to Applications (or maybe some new flag set), when you double click it it should say something like "Do you want to install this app [Install] [Inspect disk image contents]". Very very simple.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

PufPufPuf 2mo ago

When I first got a Macbook, I tried installing an app and had no idea what to do once I saw the app icon, arrow and Applications folder with no additional instructions. I didn't figure it out and had to look it up. For an ecosystem praised for its "user friendliness", this was certainly not the best first impression.

raffael_de 2mo ago
As someone who grew up with Windows the canonical equivalent action would have been to select "install" from the dmg file's context menu (which is opened by a right click). The MacOS way to do it feels too gimmicky and different-for-being-different's sake ...
- redeeman 2mo ago
  well.. its not like they were hiding it when they said "think differently"
  - Schiendelman 2mo ago
    They said "think different" - intentionally not using the adverb, to be different!
- frollogaston 2mo ago
  They weren't just trying to be different with Mac, more like it's an outdated part of the system. It made more sense when software was often on CDs or floppies, cause a disk image is a virtual version of that, and that was a nice feature Mac OS had for a long time that Windows didn't. But now it's like the save icon still being a floppy disk in 2026.

isoprophlex 2mo ago

You get the program image from the web and you move it into your folder holding application?! Having some custom wizard that's never the same fuck up your entire windows registry, write to wherever the fuck it wants on disk, now THAT is surreal

jiehong 2mo ago

I might be in the minority, but for me the best way is installing with a cli (like homebrew or winget on windows). A UI way to install is only a fallback.

bni 2mo ago

This is one of my favorite things with the Mac. I feel it is very intuitive me moving the app to Applications, then just move it to trash if it sucks and it is completely gone. setup.exe .pkg installers make me feel dirty because I hav enough control over how it will fuck up my system or not.

krackers 2mo ago
I think most of the complexity is around the concept of disk images. If the app was just distributed in a zip file (like many in fact are) then you just unzip it, and the application is right there. You can move it to /Applications if you want (and many apps offer this) but it's not necessary. Disk images seem to be much rarer on other platforms, and are usually only used for images of optical disks. Even the concept of "ejection" can be confusing, especially since when mounted disk images appear almost identical to actual physical removable media. I'd like to hear the reasoning behind why mounting disk images isn't relegated to a vestigal "power user" feature by now, since it seems like zip files (especially in appledouble format) can serve the same needs for most normal user flows.
jeroenhd 2mo ago
The app icon approach only give the illusion of control. That may be worth something too, but whether you run a .pkg or a program, the app developer can do whatever they want with the permissions you grant it. There is an advantage to being able to move a program to any locations and run it from there, and while the same can easily be done on Windows (just make one big .exe!), it's not expected for users to just move install directories around. That said, programs break the same way: configuration pointing at wrong directories, permissions going wacky, you name it. It just seems to go wrong less often on macOS because of developer expectations.
eviks 2mo ago
The moving step is not intuitive, read other comments, it's also redundant in a better designed system. And of course it's not completely gone, but leaves plenty of garbage behind. And of course you have no control over it

t43562 2mo ago

A long while ago I found myself helping out with some products MSI installer. I don't think anyone can really point a finger at the Mac and accuse it of having issues by comparison with what seemed to me to be the nightmare from hell of trying to make an installer that would work on various versions of windows. It's not the fault of MSI per se, although its concept seems utterly frightful to me, but the way DLLs work and are registered and where you have to install them etc. When your app requires an older or newer MSVCRT etc. Also...the registry...something else that makes good old UNIX text file editing seem good to me. I always thought that libsomelibrary.so.MAJORVERSION.MINORVERSION with symbolic links from libsomelibrary.so.MAJORVERSION and libsomelibrary.so allowed one to create dependencies that made sense - more or less specific as you chose. It also allows different versions of the same library to exist in the same directory such that one is less likely to break existing software when installing something newer (or older). To be fair it might just be the way Windows tries to keep compatibility for the ages that makes it super difficult. I do think that you tend to get similar outcomes from similar assumptions/requirements and compatibility was indeed very very important till the internet became good enough to offer everyone easy upgrades. I'm not a big snap or flatpack fan but DMG seems rather in their class - making things simpler. It might be easy to run an MSI after someone has burned many hours testing it to get it to work everywhere but to me it's a non-simple architecture that is made to work by extreme effort. I'd rather a simpler architecture that open source packagers could manage more easily. As an example, I tried creating an Ubuntu package recently - a plugin for GNU Make that adds some useful functions.....that was SO hard - worse than any MSI experience I ever had - and I gave up. There were millions of confusing instructions and none worked properly. I couldn't work out which way was up or down - I don't know how people do it. On Artix (an OS which is a little harder to install than Ubuntu) it is an absolute dream to create packages - exceedingly so. It might be that they aren't the greatest packages in the world but something that can be developed easily and got working can also be improved easily.

jeroenhd 2mo ago
Windows' CRT setup allows for binary compatibility with older versions. You can go without if you just statically compile the dependencies into your program, but many Windows developers choose to rely on runtime versions which may or may not be shared. MSI's biggest mistake was probably granting developers the capability of invoking any program they like. The format was originally designed similar to Linux packages. Installation steps were atomic and reversible. If something went wrong (i.e. you ran out of disk space halfway through), the installer can undo every change step by step so you can try again later without overwrite prompts. Unfortunately, adding the ability to call executables means that atomicity is usually lost. macOS applications seem to just package every single DLL they need inside of their application folder rather than relying on the OS. I'd do the same if I were developing for macOS with how often Apple likes to make breaking changes. The symlinking trick for .so files often breaks on Linux. Method parameters change, structs get altered, and you can quickly create working-but-unstable versions if you have a different version of the same program. The Windows way, used by Flatpak and Snap, of targetting known-good sets of libraries will work around that. The macOS way (AppImage) also works but doesn't allow for deduplication. It might, if the AppImage would be uncompressed and files would be extent-aligned on a modern file system, but in practice that won't happen. In theory, Windows and Linux offer the same app installation flow as macOS. AppImage and huge .exe files can be moved around and deleted just as easily. Windows will let you do all kinds of things with desktop.ini, including custom folder backgrounds, and its native .iso support can offer a very similar mount-then-delete flow to .DMG files.

vintagedave 2mo ago

That Squirrel screenshot is fascinating: what happened to the traffic light controls? https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/as-a-windows-user-its-a-very-surreal-way-to-install-a-program/32.2096w.avif https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/as-a-windows-user-its-a-v...

krackers 2mo ago
Probably someone installed a custom theme (you could do it on osx back in the day, see e.g. "Aqua Extreme").

vintagedave 2mo ago

There are some amazing graphics here. These are images users would see very rarely: usually only on the initial installation. (A Sparkle app update would usually run for the rest of the app's lifetime.) The amount of care and polish put into something the user would see only once really shows the change in attitude around apps and UI on the Mac today. macOS is on the surface the same. But seeing this causes a feeling of a deep gulf. How can we or Apple regain it? That special sense of value and care in the OS and its app developers?

pavlov 2mo ago

I think the most confusing concept in this process for new users is the shortcut inside the disk image because it breaks the isolation metaphor. So, you download a file, and it's something called an "image" which opens in Finder like you'd inserted an external thumb drive. Fine. You open the image, and inside is... Your own Applications folder? Wait, how can the file I downloaded contain all of my apps? This kind of indirection is natural to developers and other advanced users: the file you got from the internet doesn't really know about your Applications, it's a link to a generic system location that gets resolved by Finder. But for less advanced users it's oddly circular: this virtual disk that came from the internet has my data in it. It's something that never happens with an actual thumb drive.

jeroenhd 2mo ago
There's a tiny little arrow in the corner to indicate that it's a shortcut. But this really confused me when I first started using macOS as well. You're just expected to know that the applications folder in the disk image you just downloaded isn't actually inside of the disk image. When I first opened a .dmg, I thought the arrow symbolised some kind of progress bar and waited for a moment to let it do its installation. That didn't work, so I copy-pasted the folder into my Applications folder manually. When I later opened a different .dmg that had instructions about how I needed to drag and drop myself, I actually realised what I needed to do.
- ffsm8 2mo ago
  i actually vividly remember when they started introducing that flow... the first time i came across it was a total knee-jerk negative reaction. unrelated to that, i switched to windows a few years later (my old imac wasnt good enough to play world of warcraft)... but when i came back to it 10+ years later, it still felt strange. i mean its neat from a minimalism perspective, but the decision to not ship with a regular installation UI in OG macOS X came with the tradeoff of not cleanly _uninstalling_ software either. config files etc were always left over. but i guess - as Apple keeps locking down good old macOS X in favour of forcing software to go through the Apple Store this is going away as a sideeffect?

gushie 2mo ago

I've been using a Mac for 4 years. I still just want a nice simple install button.

mig39 2mo ago

It's a disk image, because in the old days, you'd install apps by dragging them from a floppy or CD to the Applications folder.

dgellow 2mo ago

Really nice collection! Seeing Adium makes me nostalgic

Kim_Bruning 2mo ago

It really depends what you grew up with I guess. As someone originally coming off of RISC OS[1] way back when, the mac way is closer to intuitive than the windows way, while Linux's approach of splitting files across the entire FS so that you can't possibly find all of them is "The Real WTF". (Nixos is even further from that original intuition in a lot of ways. Oh for the days of drag-dropping the !App dir to wherever you happen to have space; and maybe dragging it to !menon if you needed to actually find it back ) [1] The operating system that came with a thin welcome booklet with reassuring pencil art explaining how to hold a mouse, and what the difference between a click and a doubleclick was. [2] [2] https://archive.org/details/risc-os-5.28-user-guide/page/6/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/risc-os-5.28-user-guide/page/6/m... Oh wow, still exists in the RISC OS 5 manual. This kind of manual used to be famed : Eg. Chapter 1 introduces what a desktop is; Chapter 2 explains the mouse; 3 Explains the keyboard ; 4 explains what a window is. Give a motivated naive user this guide and there's a small chance they might actually grok the thing when they're done.

benj111 2mo ago
Agreed with the Linux thing. We have multiple different bin folders still, because some hard drive on a PDP 11 wasn't big enough?!? On the other hand it has package management so you don't have to worry about it so much.
- Ferret7446 2mo ago
  Mainstream Linux distros got rid of the bin split many years ago.
  - fragmede 2mo ago
    and then Nix came out, and went running off in the other direction as fast as it could!
BerislavLopac 2mo ago
And this is also the reason why Mac is doing it this way. One of the big goals in development of MacOS X was to keep the experience consistent with the old Macintosh OS 9.x, even though it was based on a completely different paradigm (Unix). And the UX of Macintosh basically developed along with its paradigms, because in many ways it was the first popular OS that widely accepted the things, like windows, menus, trash and the like.

amaccuish 2mo ago

Before we I introduced an MDM at work, I can tell you, 80% of users were running apps from .dmgs from their desktop. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if that means the process is "intuitive".

phtrivier 2mo ago

Unrelated, but the gallery of "drag icon to Applications" contains a screenshot of Joost : does anyone remember that ? It could have been Netflix or Youtube a decade before, if only there had been, you know, any good show to watch on it. That was the first "mass market" piece of software I worked on, a good 20 years ago now, and it brings some memories of ye old time...

kingkongjaffa 2mo ago

As a omni user of Linux, OSx and Windows, the most peculiar part to me is this: > teaches you that the app is just a file that you can place anywhere, or trash when done. It's actually kind of opaque and not obvious at all, how exactly to uninstall apps on a Mac.

TZubiri 2mo ago

I'm also a windows user, along with user of other OS. What's surreal to me is the Windows Installation process, the concept of an installation process that allows any app to have complete unsandboxed access to the files of other applications. In the year 2026 At first the idea of dragging a file seemed unnecessary, I would have thought it's better for the installer to do that automatically, but now I understand that the user is in control, and the best installation mechanism is not the one with less clicks, users are expected to grant permissions to applications they control, and in this case they are showing the user where those files are, and that the installation is nothing more than moving a folder around.

kzrdude 2mo ago

As a mac user (also a linux user), I got used to it and it always seemed better than the alternative (weird install programs).

magic_hamster 2mo ago

After spending years with the major OS families, I think that Linux is the only one which had the right ideas and was able to keep an efficient solution working for decades. Brew and other MacOS package managers are a testament to this. Package managers crafted with care around the user needs is always going to be the way to go. This highlights something that's been a creeping issue for at least a decade if not longer: both MacOS and Windows are not built around the user anymore, for different reasons. Windows is easy to see, it is now an OS as a service where the user is exploited right below the comfort threshold that will make them abandon the system (although for many this threshold was crossed long ago). For Apple it's not as immediately obvious, but their forced obsolescence through constantly shifting requirements and tooling means that nothing lasts very long in the Mac ecosystem, you always have to upgrade, as a consumer and as a developer, rebuild, refactor, push updates and eventually be forced to replace your hardware. So you are basically caught in a neverending game of catchup and Apple is always a step ahead of you, by design. Booting up almost any flavor of Linux is just leagues ahead in terms of simply letting you use your computer tending to your needs.

pbrum 2mo ago

Fantastic work by the compiler/author, and lovely work by all those developers and designers through the years. Great contribution to HN

Razengan 2mo ago

As someone who started on Windows then went to Macs, I always and still find the "installer" method absolutely horrid. Why do I have to run an app before I can run an app?? Why do they all look different? Why do most of them insist on shoving other crap into my computer?? Copying a prepackaged bundle is the more intuitive way: You take something from outside and you bring it into your house/put it on your desk. And then deleting it when you're done (leftover settings files being an optional "pro" step) Let's not even talk about how "Alt+F4" remotely evokes "close/quit" and other weird shit Windowsers assume is normal.

disposition2 2mo ago

It’s neat the amount of care and thought that used to go into just an icon or a one off dmg background screen. I can remember styling my Windows XP and Linux machine back in the day, I didn’t have the money to afford a Mac but I could make my machine look like one or even nicer than Aqua, and it was all because the many great artists freely sharing their works (like Louie Mantia mentioned in the article). So many great artists on Neowin and AquaSoft, I believe some even went to work for Apple. Cool article, thanks for sharing.

ifh-hn 2mo ago

I'm not a Mac user, and have no.comment about the drag to application folder thing. But as a Linux and windows user, I always liked how windows could have portable apps. These dmg files seem similar to having a portable app. Back in the day I had a usb with my favourite apps and distros on it. I might be wrong since I've never used a Mac before.

d3Xt3r 2mo ago
> I always liked how windows could have portable apps. Linux has portable apps too - AppImages and static binaries. As for Macs, dmg files are not apps, they're just archives like zip files. The apps go inside the dmg files. And these "apps" are actually just plain old folders with extra metadata that makes macOS treat it like it was an executable. But you can infact navigate to the inside of an app if you use the terminal, like you can literally `cd` to it and treat it like a folder that it is.
- andai 2mo ago
  Linux has portable apps too — the windows ones ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624

gurumeditations 2mo ago

Using my Mac as a lifelong Windows user has given me new appreciation for the elegant logical design of Windows 7 and XP. It’s clear the Mac is full of bizarre retrograde UX choices leftover from the original Macintoshes in the 80s and the only reason I can kind of figure out using it now is because I grew up with iOS as well which has been cannonballed into the old workings of macOS over the years. Clearly Apple never gave a damn about fixing macOS until recently probably because it was the same handful of people using it for the past 40 years.

justsomehnguy 2mo ago

AKA tech support nightmare. But I want to shout out for the way the progress bar of the video was made - I hate disappearing ones, but at least it doesn't obscure the content itself! It's still mind boggling what the video controls in 2026 are treated like Flash ActiveX iframe.

de6u99er 2mo ago

When you look at an application in your Applications folder (like Safari or Microsoft Word), macOS makes it look and act like a single file or icon. But if you were to right-click (or control-click) on that app and select "Show Package Contents", you would see the truth: it is actually a folder structure.

frollogaston 2mo ago
I'm guessing this is why Mac apps tend to be more self-contained while Windows ones like to be installed. An exe can have resource files archived into it, but it'd probably be inefficient to run the program off that.

Self-Perfection 2mo ago

6 years ago at a new job I was forced to use provided Mac laptop. Never used MacOS before. So first thing first: get Firefox. Managed to download .dmg file. Double clicked it. And now I see utterly confusing window with an image that tells me that I need to move downloaded Firefox to applications to use it. Where I am supposed to get the thing that I need to move? Totally not clear that the icon in this window is interactive and can be dragged. Why can not it do this thing by itself? At which point association with handling http links will be configured and whom? How am I supposed to figure out that dmg is like a zip archive? I was completely lost until colleague showed me what I was supposed to do. I burst into laughter when he showed me. I don't think he understood why.

northisup 2mo ago

I always assume an app that uses an installer is hiding something from me.

andai 2mo ago
In my experience, an app that doesn't use an uninstaller is giving me the gift of hunting for hidden treasure all over my hard drive.

andai 2mo ago

I'm confused by the title. I expected the article to be about the title, i.e. a windows user's perspective here, but this doesn't appear to be mentioned at all. It's also quoted, so I thought it was referring to some other post somewhere, but there's nothing about that either. Is the author quoting himself? Other than that, I found this to be a great article.