I have no idea why every proprietary application needs to run at startup and have "update" and "maintenance" processes running when I'm not trying to use it.
The answer to this is simple, whether you like it or not - it's the users. They expect the software to be updated automatically. They never do it manually, but they are first to complain that something is not working on their not-updated-for-two-years version.
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
Isn't that what package management is for, though? It's not the job of an application to handle things like window decorations or storage quotas... or updates.
It is. Does Windows have package manager that is popular among its users? Isn't the most popular way to install things on MacOS to just download a dmg from a website?
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
On Mac, it's the App store or homebrew (third party) (or Ports, if that's still maintained). On Windows, it's the MS Store or chocolatey (third party) (I think?)
I don't think many people download .exe or .dmg files any more.
Literally nobody is using Chocolatey or MS Store. Some people use Mac App Store, but most application aren't there. Only developers use Homebrew or MacPorts. Most people download from websites.
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@moopet When there are tens of thousands of software packages in a distribution, updating a program with hundreds of dependencies becomes quite difficult, especially for non-free software. Yes, all sorts of snap and flatpak are used to solve this problem, but they completely eliminates the advantages of shared libraries, which are designed to avoid code duplication.
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
@katafrakt it doesn't matter for the purposes of this whether many people use it or not, it's the only practical way for applications to behave unless (as @mariamarsh notes) we all move to statically-linked behemoths.
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
The answer to this is simple, whether you like it or not - it's the users. They expect the software to be updated automatically. They never do it manually, but they are first to complain that something is not working on their not-updated-for-two-years version.
Isn't that what package management is for, though? It's not the job of an application to handle things like window decorations or storage quotas... or updates.
It is. Does Windows have package manager that is popular among its users? Isn't the most popular way to install things on MacOS to just download a dmg from a website?
On Mac, it's the App store or homebrew (third party) (or Ports, if that's still maintained). On Windows, it's the MS Store or chocolatey (third party) (I think?)
I don't think many people download .exe or .dmg files any more.
Literally nobody is using Chocolatey or MS Store. Some people use Mac App Store, but most application aren't there. Only developers use Homebrew or MacPorts. Most people download from websites.
@moopet When there are tens of thousands of software packages in a distribution, updating a program with hundreds of dependencies becomes quite difficult, especially for non-free software. Yes, all sorts of snap and flatpak are used to solve this problem, but they completely eliminates the advantages of shared libraries, which are designed to avoid code duplication.
@katafrakt it doesn't matter for the purposes of this whether many people use it or not, it's the only practical way for applications to behave unless (as @mariamarsh notes) we all move to statically-linked behemoths.
Oh yeah, of course, if the reality does not matter, keep wondering why every application has this kind of background process.
The question is, "what's wrong with code in 2022" and the culture of downloading separate things for everything is part of that.