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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

#91

Post by al_borland »

everdrive wrote: post #51
GeekyBear wrote: post #46

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…

>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. And the companies that make such products _never_ care about making sure an uninstallation is actually clean.

In the file menu of the installer, there is generally an option to see all the files it is placing on the system with full system paths. I generally note this down so I can make sure to clean things up completely if/when needed.

For app that just get dragged into the Applications folder, they end up doing all this additional file creation on first-launch instead of via an installer. That actually makes it harder. For those I tend to search the ~/Library folder for the name of the app and the company that made it, hoping I find all the remnants to delete. There are apps, like AppZapper and AppCleaner, which try to automate this process. I still think it’s ridiculous that Apple never solved for this. It’s one of the reasons I always do a manual migration to a new Mac. It feels like the only real way to clean things up.

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

#93

Post by xp84 »

post-it wrote: post #80
GeekyBear wrote: post #46

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…

I started developing for my Mac a few weeks ago and I'm blown away by how easy it is to make an app that feels Mac native and includes quality of life features like CloudKit sync across all your devices. It's become clear that most companies don't give the tiniest shit about any of that.

It's obvious why they wouldn't give a shit about that, though - the Mac is not their main focus. Most companies that make software for PCs are obliged to make at least Windows and Mac versions, and to build an application "The Apple Way," using SwiftUI, and things like "CloudKit" etc. would mean a whole dedicated Mac-experienced design team and Mac-experienced engineering team. This would result in an app that fundamentally works and behaves differently than their app would on Windows, because these operating systems have different conventions and standards.

Now, that would make people like you and me very happy -- but consider it from the big company's perspective. Now instead of supporting a piece of software which has a single set of features and a single consistent (and 'braaanded,' eyeroll) Electron UI (and, mostly, a single set of bugs), you're supporting two completely different apps with completely different UIs. Building a new Important Feature means building it from the ground up twice, and QAing it twice. And customer service needs to be trained to walk customers through both of these different apps which work differently, and some of the customers are so confused, they can't even tell you if they're on a Mac or not.

25 years ago, before cross-platform frameworks existed (other than Java, which wasn't often used to these ends then), that was sort of how they had to do these things, and in practice, the results were either that a ton of hardware shipped with no Mac support whatsoever (wasn't worth it) or with a bare-bones Mac version on the CD that was incredibly low-effort, and clearly still written by people who barely knew how the Mac was meant to work.

This very real phenomenon is why we are cursed with cross-platform everything. The difference between a single cross-platform codebase and even two dedicated good-citizen apps is a vast chasm.

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

#95

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

freak42 wrote: post #92

For personal reasons I am avoiding all Samsung products and over the years it seems like I unintentionally dodged one annoying issue after another.

My in-laws bought a Samsung TV, and I swore them off when I saw ads on the menu.

Then I stayed in Hawaii for a while and my rental had a Samsung washer… it had a DOWNLOAD setting on the dial so I could hook up the app… for… washing clothes… it didn’t clean anything, it had a minutes long process of shaking my clothes about to get a feel for them before it bothered adding a lady’s thimble full of water… nope. I had never missed my speed queens so much.

Then I was at a big box store and their Samsung fridge with a tablet on the door locked up and hung.

That was three personal strikes.

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

#96

Post by xp84 »

al_borland wrote: post #91
everdrive wrote: post #51

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. And the companies that make such products _never_ care about making sure an uninstallation is actually clean.

In the file menu of the installer, there is generally an option to see all the files it is placing on the system with full system paths. I generally note this down so I can make sure to clean things up completely if/when needed. For app that just get dragged into the Applications folder, they end up doing all this additional file creation on first-launch instead of via an installer. That actually makes it harder. For…

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 "security" it's funny to me that they've never even tried to build uninstallation functionality. Even though a majority of apps with "Installers" use, not arbitrary installer executables like Windows, but .pkg files that open with Apple's "Installer" app. That means it's Apple's code placing most of those files in place, and even if the install includes a "script" portion, it seems like a solvable problem that Installer.app could monitor the files being added or changed by the script process, to at least let you view a log of what happened if not reverse the changes.

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

#97

Post by didgetmaster »

Sarkie wrote: post #52
didgetmaster wrote: post #33

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 /

Thank you for such a great product

Glad you liked it. I still have fond memories of working on it.

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

#98

Post by SkiFire13 »

> Localization files for every language on Earth - [...] - Samsung really wanted to make sure everyone on the planet could experience this suffering equally

Why are you considering localization as bloat? I bet your reaction wouldn't be positive if your native language(s) were missing instead.

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

#99

Post by rmunn »

ryandrake wrote: post #69
rmunn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I know people who are snuggly proud about not reading the manual and I really don't get it. Agreed... but there seem to be more and more products that either don't have manuals, or whose manuals are so badly written that reading them turns out to be a waste of time. I feel like people are being trained not to read manuals anymore, so I understand the people whose first instinct is "that thing is going to be use…

Installing software should not require a manual. It should require one button click, or one drag action.

While I agree in the general case (e.g., software aimed at end users), there's also a good reason why the Archlinux Wiki is so good: because installing an OS does require a manual if you want to be able to do any customization at all (yes, you can just install the defaults, but if that's what you wanted, you probably wouldn't be running Arch). And the same applies to systems software not quite as broad in scope as an OS: there can be multiple different customizations you might need to apply, or you might need various dependencies. atoav didn't mention whether the software the sysadmin was installing had a distro package (it might not have even been on a Linux system, no particular reason to assume it was Linux rather than FreeBSD or AIX or Solaris or...), but I kind of assume it didn't, precisely because there were installation instructions. The sysadmin wouldn't have been "swear[ing] his way through an installation process" if the installation process was "sudo apt install some-piece-of-software", after all.

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

#100

Post by kstrauser »

Aurornis wrote: post #66
ryandrake wrote: post #65

> 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…

You can just turn that off once and leave it off if it bothers you. Even most power users leave it on except for temporary situations like this because it’s a helpful security protection.

Yup. I leave it alone. As much as it’s a hassle every 2 years or so when I need to do some voodoo on my laptop, it’s even more of a hassle for potential attackers. For me, for my risk profile, I believe it has a good return on investment.
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