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Everything is installed as portables in user directory

Is that a good thing?



It's absolutely not, but it's being picked up industry-wide and even by Microsoft themselves. Basically any piece of Electron shitware can be found installing itself to %LOCALAPPDATA%, silently updating itself and leaving gigabytes of old copies around in subfolders. I think it's a lost battle and not worth getting angry about anymore.


In corporate environments it is, since you don’t have to get permission from the IT police to install VSCode or Firefox or grep.

(Of course, you should. But sometimes it’s not an option.)


They can prevent that if they want to (there are tons of admin software to prevent users from install unapproved software on windows) so it really is a nonissue. The main issue is extra space, but that also isn't that big of an issue if the app is written well for updates and I don't know why that would be any more or less efficient when installed by "user" vs "admin"


> prevent users from install unapproved software

While they could prevent it, that's not how. The software is never "installed". It's only unzipped to scoops install directory (usually home/scoop/...)

Then it adds the install directory to the PATH and it's done. The copied executables have never been marked as unknown by windows in my experience.

Admins could of course lock down systems to only allow executables with specific hashedls which are manually whitelisted by the admins, but just disallowing installs won't help at all

Disallowing powershell or scripting altogether makes it impossible to use as well.


> Disallowing powershell or scripting altogether makes it impossible to use as well.

You can't really do that, as pwsh can be embedded easily.


It has some pros and cons depends on what you value, but I wish that Linux ecosystem can make it easier to install software in home, no root permission needed.

I have a remote access to a ubuntu server, and I tried to use my zshrc but there is no zsh installed. Maybe asking the admin of the server to install zsh is another way to do it, but I managed to compile zsh and use it as my default shell. Although it works, but I wish that there is a easier way to install software locally without having to resort to compiling.


You can download zsh package from system repo with wget and unpack it, it's just a compressed tar.




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