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Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall

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Re: Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall

#221
post #164
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll have to check that installer trick the next time I use one. Isn't the "Receipts" folder that so angered OP kind of that same thing? I thought those included the list of files installed. In general, I think some worries about removing "every trace" are overblown, though. The receipts, for instance, are inert and they're not filling up the disk or consuming RAM. Of all the things Apple does in the name of "securit…

There are two cases: I am uninstalling because I never want to use the app, or I am uninstalling because I know I currently don't need the app and will reinstall after 6 months when I do. An example of first is a trial of an app but you don't like it in the end, an example of the latter is a game that you might want to play with the same settings later. Now, I want the option. In the first case I don't want these ine…

I stopped trying new apps as often, because I don't like how I can never really go back to a state before it was installed, unless the developer actually put effort into not spraying files everything and not leaving a trace once gone. I appreciate these developers very much, and am more likely to keep using their apps. The most junk an app install puts on my system, the more likely I am to want it gone.

Re: Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall

#222
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mac apps often do various things on your computer. Just because you dragged it to Bin, doesn't mean there are no leftovers on your computer. I'd prefer proper uninstaller any day. I think I know what you're talking about. There are likely files inside the ~/Library/Application Support/ or ~/Library/Caches/ folders for example. What is the proper, Apple way to make sure these get deleted when we delete apps? Because…

It wouldn't be hard to display "remove configuration and cache files?" modal during uninstall/trashing process. But it would be hard to go against own simplicity of platform usage idea - that's the problem. KDE's Discover after you uninstall a flatpak application shows small infobar (still really easy to miss) saying " appname is not installed but it still has data present. " with " Delete settings and user data " bu…

Mobile apps handle app data better. They have their own well defined jail to work with. Simple to locate “stuff”

Re: Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you under the impression that Windows uninstallers don't leave files and registry settings behind?

I use this https://github.com/Klocman/Bulk-Crap-Uninstaller The nice thing about Windows is that people have been writing software for it for decades. A very underestimated advantage.

The Macintosh came first, technically.

Re: Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall

#225
post #168

> I shut down my Mac. Held the power button. Booted into Recovery Mode. Opened Terminal. Ran csrutil disable. Rebooted. Opened Terminal. Deleted the kernel extensions. Ran find to confirm they’re gone. Shut down AGAIN. Booted into Recovery Mode AGAIN. Ran csrutil enable. Rebooted AGAIN. All this just to delete four dead files and their mirrors from a disk utility. This one is entirely on Apple. It was Apple who decid…

This is 100% by design and 100% a good thing. “root” aka uid=0 should NOT have unlimited privileges to permanently modify the deepest parts of the OS, as assuming uid=0 is done daily for routine operations. Modifying kernel level stuff should not be possible from this daily use privilege level. It’s an ancient holdover from unix time sharing systems that are approaching a hundred years old. If you think it’s bad, you…

Phrased a little more harshly than I would've, but I agree. SIP keeps any random process running as the device owner from running amok and paving over the system. You have to jump through just enough hoops to disable it that a rogue process can't automatically do it against you.

Re: Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall

#226
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are aware of this not hard to manage. Grep. rm -rf. Done. Usually its pretty tiny folders at least. Heavier stuff usually software makes a directory under Documents. Kinda nice in a few cases having it set up like this. For example I can delete the app but preserve my config. Drop the app right back again and no setup its turnkey and works.

grep for what? How am I supposed to know that the Foo app installed stuff under ~/Libraries/Application Support/com.bar.corporation?

Sorry you'd use Find not grep and you'd search for "Foo" or "corporation".

But if you know to do this you know that these things are stored where they are under Libraries.

Re: Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a user mode application on the Mac doesn't just allow you to drag the app into the applications folder to install, it's a red huge red flag. Personally, I'd look for another alternative from a company that better understands the Mac. Chrome, for instance, previously used an installer that had to run with administrative permissions and famously ended up rendering systems unbootable. System utilities and drivers a…

Mac apps often do various things on your computer. Just because you dragged it to Bin, doesn't mean there are no leftovers on your computer. I'd prefer proper uninstaller any day.

Yeah. But mac is still and I mean BY FAR the cleanest of all operating system when you got to uninstall stuffs.

Windows is as bad as Linux, leftovers everywhere without any sense whatsoever. Some company use a directory, other use another, makes no sense.

On Linux, at least there is some kind of uniformity but since all apps install with sudo permissions, they get put everywhere and you never really know where.

On macos, you got 2 folders to look for, all in the user directory (app, application support) and that's it.

Re: Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall

#228
post #208

I worked on a disk utility in the 90s called PartitionMagic that was one of the first ones to let you dynamically resize disk partitions. Maybe Samsung used that when naming their product. I am old, but I miss the days when the install process was copy . to / and the uninstall process was delete /

This is HN, so please share same war stories, tech stuff, etc... Thanks!

Since we had to shift (i.e. copy) blocks of data around in order to dynamically resize partitions that were formatted with FAT, NTFS, or HPFS file systems; we had to know the internal structures of each of them.

It's been a long time, but I seem to remember that there were a few areas that were not documented well by Microsoft and we had to guess what certain fields meant.

Because we often had to move file contents around, some files became more fragmented while others became less fragmented since we tried to be smart about where we moved file blocks.

My biggest takeaway was understanding file system architecture. For some features, I was impressed by what their architects designed. For others, I wondered why on Earth they did it 'that way'. I started keeping a list of things I wanted to be different and eventually incorporated many of them in my new object store design.

http://www.didgets.com

Re: Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall

#229
post #74
post #54

Years ago I shipped a MacOS product. If you deleted it, you would get an error emptying the recycle bin (or force-deleting the application bundle if you did an rm -R to it.) Why? Well, at the time Windows Explorer had an API for extensions, but MacOS didn't for Finder. We needed to add some menu items to the context menu, which on MacOS required reverse engineering Finder and injecting code into it. This then meant t…

I don’t understand. Any MacOS Finder that had an open file handle into an application bundle runs on the Unix version of MacOS, and that allows deletion of open files (the inode stays around until the process exits), doesn’t it? Or did/does the Finder check whether to-be-deleted files are open? Or did I forget how older Mac file systems behaved?

Finder does check this, yes. You can't delete open files in Finder.

Re: Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall

#230
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. I often have apps on my Mac or iPhone that ask for permission to see my camera, microphone, contacts, etc etc that I don't want it to see. But I do want other apps to be able to access those things. Being able to stop those apps from accessing before they do instead of trying to fix it after is incredibly valuable. Sure some users just accept everything, but that is not an argument against them e…

Those examples are very reasonable. However I also had Mac OS suddenly treat all m4a files on the system as potential malware and it blocked any attempt at opening them. Why did it do that? Because I checked the "set as default app" option, one minute after I had already opened the same file using the same application. The only way to open the files was by entering the password in the settings app each time - but re-…

I am pretty sure you're running into a bug and trying to make sense of a behavior that wasn't intended to exist.
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