Ignorantly: is this how MacOS kind of works? It always felt incredibly good how applications were always just this one “file” you’d drag and drop and manage.
Nothing makes me feel dumber than trying to figure out where the heck anything is or gets placed in my Ubuntu machine.
> Nothing makes me feel dumber than trying to figure out where the heck anything is or gets placed in my Ubuntu machine.
And this is made somewhat worse by Linux file managers trying to hide any part of the filesystem that’s not your home folder or mounted drives.
I get why it’s done, the directory structure of your average Linux install is an absolute maze that’s sometimes confusing even for the technically inclined, let alone the home users targeted by major distributions. It’s ultimately treating the symptom and not the cause, though, and I think more Linux distributions should give serious thought to modernizations of their filesystem structures (as Gobo has).
It’s tempting to play with this myself. My goals would be to come up with a structure that’s reasonably self-explanatory, guides novices away from the dragons, and allows file managers to hide very little (maybe nothing) without consequence.
Why would they not? we all have to use computers. Secretaries used to be able to code, such a thing is not possible nowadays as programmers create more and more obscurity.
Corporate jargon is how companies hide away inefficiencies and illegalities. Now, jargon is usually not that, but most of the time it is. The same way programmers said a kilobyte is 1024 bytes (seriously?)
To add to your point, yes, do ask a random person what notepad.exe doe vs what vi or emacs does.
A text editor is user-facing; the underlying filesystem hierarchy mostly isn't. I'll grant some of it is; it would make sense for a user to know (and perhaps even care) about /home, and in a system that isn't centered around a package manager I could even see them caring about whatever the directory is for applications, but beyond that it doesn't matter how /usr is laid out, or how the CPU is microcoded, or whether the kernel is monolithic, or whether their applications are written in Rust or C#. It's a black box, and for less-technical users that's fine. I won't say there aren't ways to improve, even to simplify things, and I do wish that normal people still programmed, but the reality is that computers really are just that complicated, and once we get over trying to explain technical things to less-technical people, the FHS is fine for what it is.
The trick of shoving everything inside the bundle (including write things) no longer works if you're codesigned - there was always a note in the docs (buried, as usual) that while it might work it wasn't guaranteed to always work. Sure enough, as of a recent release it'll invalidate your signature if you've distributed it codesigned and write into the bundle.
If I wrote programs for Mac, this is one of the things that would really piss me off. Then, I'd write to ~/Library because I'm not gonna spend the time to figure out how to make it work with codesigning, if at all possible.
But like... why? If you wrote for Mac, you'd also probably follow the news and updates from Apple, which didn't exactly hide the direction they've been pushing things in.
You also _should_ write to a third party folder, preferably `~/Library/Application\ Support`. It's what it's for, after all.
> It always felt incredibly good how applications were always just this one “file”
While I agree with that in principle, in practice that's not true for a lot of applications that put a lot of stuff into ~/Library and /Library, and it's not unusual to see multi-step manual instructions on how to uninstall some apps on macOS. (Especially important if those apps add Login items) Windows' Add/Remove Programs at least gives a central space to trigger an uninstall, and most apps stick to it properly.
Why are you downvoted? That is the solution. Every package manager has this feature. One can list the files owned by any package on any Linux system, doesn't matter if it's Arch Linux or Termux.
I respect your curious preference, but my theory of mind is failing me on this one. You like dependencies, or moving files by typing, or perhaps even both?
Heh. Yes and yes and in general I like to see the guts and be free to easily fiddle with them. The Mac way is the software equivalent of how you can't open their hardware easily, which I also loathe. To me a love of Apple is one of the surest signs that a person is not a real hacker/programmer but is just in this industry for the $. "I just want to get shit done" ...no you just want to make money. There are exceptions but they are rare.
Nothing makes me feel dumber than trying to figure out where the heck anything is or gets placed in my Ubuntu machine.