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pulsar-edit / pulsar

A Community-led Hyper-Hackable Text Editor
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Windows: Bad install folder and forced #277

Closed Neustradamus closed 1 year ago

Neustradamus commented 1 year ago

Thanks in advance for your bug report!

What happened?

The "Windows.Pulsar.Setup.1.100.0-beta.exe" installer forces install of the product in: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Programs\pulsar\

There is no question where it must be installed and by default, it must be, if it is a:

Thanks in advance.

Which OS does this happen on?

🪟 Windows

OS details

ALL

Which CPU architecture are you running this on?

None

What steps are needed to reproduce this?

Launch "Windows.Pulsar.Setup.1.100.0-beta.exe" and look the C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Programs\pulsar\ folder.

Additional Information:

No response

confused-Techie commented 1 year ago

So I do totally agree that Users should be given a choice of install location, although one thing to note here, is if we move the default location outside of AppData that'll break user only installs.

That is anyone attempting to install Pulsar onto an Enterprise managed PC will no longer be able to install without IT or Admin assistance, and could possible affect those using a shared system as well, to where this will install the application globally for all users on a system, and if said user is not the administrator of the system will again be unable to install at all.

Additionally I'm pretty sure Atom's default install location was into the AppData folder as well, but I may be wrong on that one.

@Neustradamus is there a reason we need to make this change? Did it negatively affect anything on your system?

Neustradamus commented 1 year ago

@confused-Techie: To install a new version, it removes the previous, there is not break ^^

People want to select the installation folder on Windows OS instead of the %LocalAppData% forced.

Microsoft Windows uses since a very long time:

Of course, people must to select another folder too.

A lot of server admins and users have space problem on a machine.

And with deployment of roaming user profiles :

confused-Techie commented 1 year ago

@Neustradamus As a Windows Admin for a small org myself I'm familiar with the general layout of applications, but installing an app into AppData isn't in of itself a bad thing. And in general is a common choice from some applications.

And again I'm on board with finding out how we can present this option to the user, but installing our application here alone I wouldn't think would lead to space problems? Unless there's something I'm missing.

If anything the application being installed into AppData could help ensure the data is associated to the user account and backed up in some backup methods.

But otherwise was just wanting to see if there was an exact reason you labeled the issue as "Bad install folder" since really it's just a choice of the three major install locations (Four if we include the Windows Store Installation Directory), rather than a feature request to change the default.

And for anyone not on a Windows System to know the discussion here, the AppData folder is a common default location for App installs, such as NVIDIA, Firefox, Atom, Bitwarden, Discord, Docker Desktop, Electron, GitHub CLI, GitHub Desktop, Golang, Google Chrome, Firefox, Steam, Teams, node-gyp, pnpm, yarn and so on, so it isn't the wrong place to install an app as clarification.

Neustradamus commented 1 year ago

About forced %LOCALAPPDATA%, several softwares have a problem because Squirrel based!

GitHub Atom, GitHub Desktop and other softwares have tickets about this problem...

Mozilla Firefox permits to select and by default it is "%PROGRAMFILES%". Google Chrome has "Enterprise" build which permits too: https://chrome.com/enterprise. Nvidia drivers is installed in "%PROGRAMFILES%".

More informations about folders in Microsoft Windows:

1/ %PROGRAMFILES% is a folder first found in Microsoft Windows 95 and included in all later versions of Microsoft Windows that stores the software programs installed on the computer.

2/ %USERNAME%\AppData