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by kgtm 3988 days ago
Too bad that the Atom developers seem to be completely disrespectful of Windows users. They impose arbitrary rules that go against the philosophy of the OS and users' common sense:

* They don't allow the user to select where to install Atom, instead proposing mucking with symlinks, while at the same time crying "simplicity". Uhm, yeah...

* They don't understand what portable software is, and refuse to provide a self-contained installer (settings and all). They propose setting a global environment variable to point to the settings directory instead. Seriously?

If you want to release software for multiple platforms, you should get off your high horse and show some respect.

Link: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/7095

4 comments

Yeeep. Same reason I prefer Hg over git. It's simpler and is a first-class citizen on Windows, whereas I have to use Cygwin/MSSys and the sometimes ancient dependencies (OpenSSH from like 2008 or something ridiculous).
If you want to use somebody else's software on your system show some respect and do it yourself, instead of demanding it like an entitled brat.

It's not their fault that windows still cooks its own soup while the rest of the world is *nix.

Be happy that people support your backwards OS at all, because lets face it, windows is horrible for developing anything not .net .

> windows is horrible for developing anything not .net

That is such bullshit I don't even know how to start responding to you.

That's not an ok comment to post here. Its parent wasn't, either.

Comments on Hacker News need to be civil and substantive. Please follow the site guidelines, which are linked at the bottom of every page.

Edit to make comment more civil and substantive while retaining its content, can't apply it anymore though. (versioned comments without edit lock would be nice)

" I don't see how having a philosophy and applying it into software they develop is disrespectful. If anything, I find it disrespectful to demand change to something they publish free of charge in such a tone, after all you are free to fork and adapt their work however you please.

Additionally it is not their fault that the windows philosophy clashes with the unix world, which is something I'd hold microsoft accountable for.

Unix tools are hard to get right on windows, see git, which basically installs its own userland on windows. I wouldn't judge them for picking a way and sticking with it. "

In the interest of being more civil and adding to my comment too, I agree with most of what you have said.

I only disagree with the snarky Windows development comment. :) Visual Studio is hands down the best IDE I have ever used. The DirectX API is very nice (just ask any game developer and they'll tell you how much of a pig OpenGL is to work with). I use OSX at work and Windows at home, I much prefer development on Windows.

Sorry, I can't really speak for that. I have only used ST and Atom on Mac :-/
The issue is just ridiculous. Can't be that hard to add an installer path :-/