alt Hacker NewsAs a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program
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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.
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.
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/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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm just glad I'm not the only one who says damage in their head for .dmg files
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
As a mac user (also a linux user), I got used to it and it always seemed better than the alternative (weird install programs).
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.
Fantastic work by the compiler/author, and lovely work by all those developers and designers through the years. Great contribution to HN
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
That Squirrel screenshot is fascinating: what happened to the traffic light controls?
https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/as-a-windows-user-its-a-v...
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.
I've been using a Mac for 4 years. I still just want a nice simple install button.
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.
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.
Is the quote in the title a reference to something?
Really nice collection! Seeing Adium makes me nostalgic
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Oh, that's an article on macs. It's actually surreal to require a manual action to install a program.
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.