this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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I'd take it a step further and say that all programs should be completely self-contained in one folder.
This is the big thing I miss from my “pre-Unix” Mac days. In OS9 and earlier, apps were self contained, and didn’t spread their garbage everywhere. You deleted an app, you deleted all the app. Granted, there was a tradeoff (the parade of conflicting control panels and extensions you had to manually diagnose when your machine went sideways) but I never understood why in the Windows and Linux worlds devs would code so sloppily. Who told that dev my Documents folder is where their nonsense needs to go? That Documents folder is for my use, not theirs.
Still salty after all these years
I get where you’re coming from, but this seems to have been the “lazy” answer, and is certainly not a consumer-friendly solution. Ideally there would have been dedicated directories for application configs where the application has permission to write, and the Documents folder would have been left alone.
On the Mac, these days, I believe “Application Support” fills this role, but there are still recalcitrant applications that default to the user’s Documents folder. That said, the devs in my company had to end up using the Documents folder for one of our products, something to do with Apple’s security, so I do sympathize. It’s just irksome, especially when you have to get another app to clean up after the apps you’ve installed because those apps uninstallers do not clean up everything.