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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

#231
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!

Our UI guy (a good friend of mine from college) did a really good job of making our DOS app look like a windows app.

The first version of our disk imaging product (Drive Image) was not so polished because I was the only one working on both the engine code and the UI layer. Once that started selling we'll, they assigned someone to help me with later versions.

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

#232
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the normal convention to ship all the language files in the installer, but for it to only install the ones that are actually used on the system?

In the past I've certainly seen that, but more and more I see all the language files being installed. You never know when someone is going to change their language, add another one, or add a new user.

But aren't those things rare enough that it's better to have people doing them rerun the installer, than to take up extra disk space for everyone that most people will never use?

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

#233
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (On a side note its been yeara since floppy drives were the A: drive... and yet we are still stuck with the primary disc being called C:) The logic behind that is pretty obvious isn't it?

Unless you mean retrocompatibility, no it's not that obvious to me.

yes. obviously, if your whole entire being and everything known about your os is that the main drive where the os is installed is c:\, then suddenly changing that to a:\ because floppy drives fell out of fashion would being nothing short of absolute chaos. you'd be amazed at the number of times c:\ is hard coded into things. It would be like swapping the brake and accelerator pedals. It would be like switching the sky to green and grass to blue. It would be total anarchy. Okay, maybe it wouldn't be that bad, but it wouldn't be good. At least for the dolt that called their system drive a:\

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This has been a thing long enough for online guides to exist that explain how to get rid of it. Fortunately, because setting the default program in a second place to get rid of a security barrier wasn't my first guess. When does a bug start to become an undocumented feature?

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

#235

On Windows, you run the uninstaller, click once, and a few seconds later everything is uninstalled. You reboot to remove any remaining files immediately, or you can just wait until the next time you naturally reboot and it happens then. This has been how it works in the Windows world for several decades . Surprising that Apple still hasn't figured this out yet.

Not to enter another OS ** measuring contest, but on linux systems you can both install and remove programs with a single command line. No need to search the web for the installer, no need to install the MSVC runtime (dependencies are handled automatically), no reboots needed pretty much ever, etc.

And no, on windows not "everything" is removed by most uninstallers. At least it wasn't back when I was using windows 7. Though I doubt it's really changed, unless you count those "windows store apps", but that's also equivalently available on mac. Both are a poor imitation of a proper linux package manager.

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

#236

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 /

Blast from the past! I’ve definitely used this. Thanks for helping make it!

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

#237

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 /

It’s still like that for most software!

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

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This has been a thing long enough for online guides to exist that explain how to get rid of it. Fortunately, because setting the default program in a second place to get rid of a security barrier wasn't my first guess. When does a bug start to become an undocumented feature?

This certainly isn't the only Mac bug that would be old enough to drive.

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

#239
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MacOS has its own set of gremlins too. You can't really blame macOS for this one. Interesting to hear this isn't just a Windows thing though.

You really can, considering that a Windows program would not have had that issue.

How is it better on Windows? It doesn't do anything to prevent third-party software from injecting into system processes.

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

#240
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, there clearly was an uninstall script. It was in the app's Contents/Resources file, and it was called CleanupMagician_Admin_Mac.sh. Which means there was some intended way to trigger running it. Perhaps Samsung's instructions or their menu system weren't clear and they managed to hide it from him. But there most definitely was an uninstall script, and if he had managed to find the intended button in the inter…

I think you are probably right. Although, with a name like that it could be some post-install cleanup of temporary files (which would explain why it was doing chown, rather than rm, although there are certainly other options!).

I wondered about the chown thing myself, but ended up concluding that the author was misremembering the errors. He probably saw some chown messages and didn't read all the hundreds of lines (I certainly don't read every line of hundreds of log lines, I skim looking for key words), meaning many of them could well have been rm failures that he misremembered as chown. But whatever it was doing, the author would have been wise to read it before deleting the directory it contained, as it would have saved him a lot of trouble finding all the bits and pieces he had to hunt down later.
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