[ninkendo]

> I'm curious whether people who daily drive mac or linux encounter these sorts of system configuration gremlins.

IMO these issues occur any time you have third party software that does the job the operating system should be doing itself. Backup/snapshot software (this should be a feature of the file system), clipboard software (the OS clipboard should cover these needs), hot key software, window management, “anti cheat” (or really anything that needs to be a kernel module), antivirus, antimalware, the list goes on.

A properly architected system should have an operating system in charge of managing apps and resources and hardware, and apps which mind their own business. Cross-cutting “horizontal” stuff like what Acronis is doing here are reimplementing things your OS should be doing, and thus aren’t tested along with the OS itself, and are bound to have issues like these.

Or you run macOS and the first party stuff is so buggy (spotlight I’m looking at you) that you’re screwed either way.

[oezi]

Explorer extensions such as the dlls which set the overlay icons used by Google Drive, OneDrive, Git, SVN, etc. are notoriously buggy. We want programmers to provide these extensions, but the documentation is bad and the interfaces are hard to program (measured by the amount of crashes caused by even a Google authored tool). I think Microsoft should have provided a test suite for these implementors to run or a certification program.

[lmz]

Lock the system -> get sued (or at least abused) for locking out third party utility writers. Leave the system open for extension -> poorly written apps by others ruin your reputation. Add telemetry to detect what third parties are doing -> privacy complaints.

There's no winning here.

[Dylan16807]

Microsoft got in trouble for having double standards in their locks, not for having locks at all.

The complaints I see for Apple generally revolve around not letting normal programs run. Also the way they crippled their firewall settings and gave certain processes a special bypass.

But honestly that's pretty beside the issue here. Programs should be able to interact with icons, but it needs to be sandboxed.