I largely agree with
@CompSciOrBust , the Wii was explicitly made extremely simple, and Switch setup is comparatively harder. What are the official resources for installing or updating Atmosphere? Well there's the
Github repo. Are there instructions in the readme or on the releases page? No.
The release zips do contain all the barebones resources that you do need to copy to SD root in one zip, and
usually that can just be straight copied over (which already is no trivial feat, so it does show that intentional dev work has gone into making those files easy to copy, which is great!). However there isn't so much of a mention of any SD card root anywhere. That is left as an exercise to the reader. It's not trivial to explain that to someone who barely knows what a file explorer is!
And then there's even less of a mention of RCM, the ways to enter it, different exploits, how to update it in the future,
how to use title override (hbmenu will helpfully display "- Applet Mode -" in big red letters, but with no explanation of what that means or what to do about it.)
Community guides, discords and this forum have become the lifeblood of helping users set that up. That's good on one hand, but if setting it up for the first time can become such an involved event, why would you ever want to force people to go through that every time for every update, compared to if you can manage your homebrew on console (AIO updater, hb-appstore (hi!)) or with a PC helper tool (HBUpdater).
It's not unrealistic. Even if the Atmosphere/Switchbrew devs don't want to solve this problem or don't view it as important, they don't have to actively avoid the issue. Why not at least link to one of the guides on Github? Or have a blurb on the releases page, or a README.txt in the zip?
If we look at the Wii U, this isn't a controversial situation. There's an official top-level website:
https://tiramisu.foryour.cafe/ that makes it very easy to set up your SD card. It also links right at the top to a community guide. There's also a
blog post from the author explaining it in technical detail, as well as explicitly mentioning:
"This also allows easy updating, because all you need to do, is replace a file on the sd card." and this is for a persistent, installed (modifies nand) exploit! Updating on console is a requested feature and is at least planned to be worked on.
Looking at the Wii, there's another similar top level page for LetterBomb:
https://please.hackmii.com/ as well as an accompanying
blog post that again calls attention to ease of use:
"will then return a nicely packaged ZIP file that is ready for extraction to the root of your SD card. Simple eh?" Once installed (another nand modifier!) HBC also would check for updates on its own.
So just to reiterate one more time, this is a completely attainable goal, and others in the scene can 100% assist.
In the Switch scene (and possibly 3DS) however, it's much harder to get a foothold to "officially" contribute. There seems to have been a different philosophy from the start. Things are now primarily the user's fault.
There's a crash? You put the files in the wrong place, just put them in the right place.
Do you know how to use a computer?
No SD card reader or usb-c cable on you? Get one.
What are you doing without one?
Your mod didn't load? You didn't properly name it.
You don't know what you're doing, do you?
There's this aftertone of judgement/hostility after some interactions, and I frequently see even big Switch-scene names throwing this stuff around as if it's fine and normal for developers to act like this too. It's not!
You can see what I'm talking about on the
Atmosphere Issues page on Github. Good luck if you head in there creating an issue on a problem that turns out to be something that is on your end. Atmosphere's
error screen is not that much more useful than
Nintendo's to the uninitiated person in terms of debugging a crash.
The PSA in this thread's topic is helpful and useful in that it is based in the current truth that upgrading Atmosphere while it's running will result in unexpected results. That
should not extend to defending the view that user-friendly on-console support resources are pointless because users are just gonna "be dumb" anyway.
Excuse the long response, but it's an issue that's close to home for me. I tried to do the best with hb-appstore on Switch/WiiU to make updating stuff on console easy and less frustrating to do. If that stops a few people from having to get up and search for an sd adapter, or save the pain of renaming a folder several times until it has the correct name, then that's great! Mission accomplished!
On WiiU, hb-appstore was endorsed
directly by dimok who created the Wii U Homebrew Launcher:
But on Switch however, it has been repeatedly portrayed as bad and unnecessary by core AMS devs both publicly and privately, and my suggestions to core components have been either ignored or been deemed unwanted.
There are many other homebrew developers that definitely care about the end to end user experience like this, and I can't speak for them directly, but I have the impression they may be similarly ostracized from having tried to offer constructive criticism or support to Switchbrew/Atmosphere devs. And so the situation continues to be addressable, but those who want to assist are pushed away.
I'd be ecstatic to be wrong about this. Go ahead and feel free to try to make suggestions or PRs to improve the user experience for installing, updating, and using Atmosphere and hbmenu. It will not be as fun as it sounds. And if you do get through, and I'm wrong, then the user experience improves for everyone! But we need to completely refuse the notion that the current situation is as straightforward for the user as it gets.