First Time installation - Why is the installer silently installing and not asking for location or anything?

Bugs & issues
#1

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  • Operating System (Platform and Version): Win 7 x64
  • Don’t know i closed the app and killed all the processes because that was really fishy
    Expected Behavior
    Asking install location or any prompt

Actual behavior
Double click Aether-Setup-2.0.0-dev.8+1902130246.6635d9a8.exe and after a few seconds my hard drive folder Program Files is full with 700 MB of the app with 0 feedback

To Reproduce
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#2

What is the bug here?

#3

It’s not a bug, but it’s not (pro-)user friendly. Since a couple of years developers seem to assume it’s fine to install their apps into the local userpace. But:

  • My OS/Userspace Hardisk is an SSD with limited space.
  • P2P apps constantly read/write to the SSD which makes it age faster.
  • Many people have more than one partition or harddisk and prefer to install some apps on their secondary drive.

This is why @jinskirt, many others an me would like to see a “Chage install directory”-option.

Greetings Grischa.

#4

— Preference for installing apps on the secondary drive: You can try to manually move the app and update your shortcuts. It’s unsupported, but might work.

— Disk space: if you’re worried about it, you can change the location of your cache files and user profile from the frontend and backend config json files, which will move any folder that is used for file storage (Remember to also move your data files to the new location, or it’l start from scratch). I use this myself when I’m running the app on a Raspberry Pi, since I don’t want to use the read/write cycles on the SD card the rPi boots from, and those cards can actually die from R/W.

— SSD: it’s been more than a decade since any SSD had any sort of R/W limits that are approachable by normal use. You should look for the Linus Tech Tips videos explaining how this used to be true, but no longer. You’d need to write effectively continuously at the max speed for the next 20-25 years to come anything close to R/W limits in any sort of modern SSD.

#5

I was gearing up to install Aether, created a directory for it etc.

While doing my due diligence, I saw this thread. Deal breaker, this is the end of my Aether testing.

From the thread here it seems that the Aether team aren’t interested, but a coupla points:

  1. I consider programs that don’t give me the choice, rude.
  2. I want to control my own computing environment, not have somebody I know nothing about do any of it.
  3. The reply says you can try x/y/z but it clearly hasn’t been tested, maybe waste my time.

Bye guys.

#6

Mike, to my best knowledge this is not something we can control or edit. We are using Electron packaging system for cross-platform builds, it does not offer as many options as Windows-specific installers.

If you find a way to get Electron do it the way you want, let me know and I’ll update the packaging script.

#7

Thanks very much for that. An involuntary design is very different from a deliberate choice.

I’m not an electron programmer. I ran a quick search: The involuntary location has been commented on several times referring to Squirrel. I did find a reference to an alternative that makes msi installers which behave “more normally” for Windows.

This link was referenced https://www.npmjs.com/package/electron-wix-msi

It may have a setting like:

{
…
ui: {
“enabled”: true,
“chooseDirectory”: true
}
}

Giving the details next to the download button would also be useful. Installer - [size], Installation - [size], location - [details] etc.

#8

The added details didn’t come through in the notification. This comment to bump the preceding reply with a potential solution listed.

#9

Thanks. I’ll take a look at this. To be more specific, our build stack involves Electron Builder — which then uses the packages that are Windows specific. So the build process involves our master spec, which gets compiled to Windows, Mac and Linux-specific specs, and then these specs get compiled into binaries and then to installers. That’s where most of the issues come from: we need to be able to specify this in the electron-builder’s spec language, otherwise the manual specs will fall behind.

This is not directly usable since we don’t use that specific library, but maybe we can somehow find its equivalent in electron-builder or request a feature there.

1 Like
#10

This issue is now fixed — with the new version, Windows installer is no longer a zero-touch install, it allows the user to change the installation path and asks for confirmation. Our underlying builder dependency started to allow this, so we’re now passing through the options now as well. Cheers.