Comment by latexr
1 year ago
> I don’t picture most people noticing such things
It doesn’t need to be most people. All it takes is a small number of people annoying you disproportionately (calling in the middle of the night) to precipitate a change.
> and in my mental model, almost everyone that would notice such things would know better than to fly off the handle about it.
Try doing tech support in any serious capacity for any moderately popular piece of consumer software. There are always “power users” who understand enough to poke around but not enough to follow their investigation to the end. As soon as they find the first place in the chain with a contact (email, phone, forum), they’ll contact it and lambast the person on the other end for all their problems. Just ask the curl developer.
But still… what’s the problem with files in the temp directory? You expect there to be files in the temp directory.
> You expect there to be files in the temp directory.
You expect that. These users are savvy enough to shoot themselves in the foot, but not to understand they don’t know how to safely operate a gun. All they know is they’re on low disk space and there’s some large file somewhere they don’t recognise and want to get rid of.
Not to place all the blame on them, though. Many of these users were bitten by a misbehaving application in the past and had to figure out themselves how to fix their problem. Some of them took the opportunity to learn about their operating system, continued to explore and learn, and eventually became programmers. The others became obsessed with optimising their system and transformed into the prime target for malware-riddled “cleaner” apps which do more harm than good.