Sparkle is slightly more limited in what it can do and grabs an authorization right (to run things as root) when updating using the system APIs to do so rather than always running as root. Some would say this is a much better design (myself included) but Adobe presumably did not go this way because they are either lazy or actually would like more access to the system than Sparkle needs.
Is anyone else tired of having all these "updaters" installed by default, running perpetually in the background? I just want to run your application. I do not want to run (as root!) your marketing puppy that begs me to update to the next version every three days. I wish there was a way to opt out of them. Or even better, have the OS treat them as malware and block them before they even get installed.
Some applications do a check on start-up to see if there is a new version available. This is a lot better. Why isn't this good enough for Adobe?
> Some applications do a check on start-up to see if there is a new version available.
Infuriating. I just want to use the software not randomly be interrupted throughout the day as one of the 50ish applications I use on a regular basis decides to do a "minor bugfix and localizations" update and thus totally interrupting what I'm doing. Oh and after it does its update, the document I double-clicked on isn't opened or there is a FTUE showing me "exciting updates."
Most modern software sits there idle all the time, why not do this nonsense in the background? Why do you need to interrupt me at precisely the one moment I actually want to use you? (This is especially annoying of gaming consoles and other "appliances")
My favorite recent example is DBeaver. The update to v7 destroyed their own SQL directory which had saved in it a SQL scratchpad document containing little SQL snippets I had written over the last few months, some fairly complex that I ran once or twice a week. I had restarted DBeaver dozens of times over those months, my SQL snippets returning each time ready to be run...
Then one day, like an idiot, I clicked the "Update" button and all that hand-written SQL was gone, like tears in the rain. Gee, thanks DBeaver! I love v7! Tell me more about your new features! I love having my careful work destroyed for an update...
To be fair, if you work with only Mac App Store apps and brew-managed packages, it's a similar (but less uniform) experience on Mac (and the `mas` utility fills in for the App Store on the CLI).
And things are better and worse depending on your Linux distro (ref: Snaps in Ubuntu).
The problem is a lot of useful software isn't (for good reason) available on the App Store.
