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 that Finder had an open file handle into our application bundle until you either restarted Finder or restarted MacOS. Then, as long as you didn't start our application, you could cleanly delete it. (Thankfully MacOS cleaned this up with the Finder extension API about a decade ago.)
Having gotten familiar with internals of both Windows and MacOS... MacOS has its own set of gremlins too.
I think the most obscene thing here is that macOS is now littered with permission prompts for camera, background execution, etc, but makes no effort to stop even industry partners from spraying the disk with dozens of files that can’t be removed easily.
That's because this particular sort of cyber security is merely theatrics with the goal of reducing user agency and increasing paranoia and vendor lock-in. The user facing friction is the goal. There will always be scams and viruses; the only practical outcome will be that you have less control over your computer, and Apple/MS/Google have more. See: Sideloading, Wayland, UWPs, iOS JIT, Windows XP and 7 still being used for accessibility
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 existing in the first place.
> It makes me wonder why did large companies are investing so much in web and putting web devs to write disk utility desktop apps?
It's because in these environments where corporate cancer has metastatised,
programmers are not in charge of hiring programmers, or much of anything when it comes to decision-making really. HR is composed of people who are not programmers. They are looking to hire people with a list of shiny hot new web stack keywords on a resume, because they have literally no other concept of how to filter candidate applications. So they end up with a bunch of hot React devs and nobody capable of making software that is fit for task.
Because they lack any better signals from within the company. At several places I have worked, hiring is almost fully detached from the groups that need the workers. They never could find good candidates for our teams. This kind of disconnect is what corporate cancer looks like, and it is endemic in big business.
To a non-developer, every application they read might as well be a list of buzzwords. They cannot comprehend a word of it. Web stacks offer the opportunity to list more and newer buzzwords. Do I set up an interview with the person who lists "C systems programmer" or with the person who is a "full stack React, Tailwind, Next.js, Node.js, Electron, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS engineer seasoned in Javascript, Typescript, HTML, and CSS"? Well, the latter certainly sounds 10x more impressive. Into the trashbin the systems programmer application goes, they just don't have enough skills for an enterprise of our scale!
this reminds me, I still have an ancient version of iTunes on my old win7 box because something got corrupted at some point and now I can't uninstall it.
Not being able to simply remove a program like you would any other program is next level evil in my book.
I have a modern application from the macOS App Store in a permanent update purgatory. I dared drag to delete it, now it won’t update nor open. But an update is always shown available!
I recently tried to install Samsung magician on Windows 11. Tried. It flat out doesn’t work, tried some basic remediation and internet searching to figure it out, but could not get it to run at all. Completely nonfunctional. Seems to be an issue with some electron configuration or command line args. I gave up because it wasn’t worth more effort, but I believe it when I read that the software is a dumpster fire.
I hate how Mac OS makes it harder to delete than to add stuff to system folders. I forgot what was it, but adding something worked with sudo, removing it required disabling sip. Is there a reason for that?
I empathize with many of the complaints, but some are a bit ridiculous. Using custom fonts in software UI is completely reasonable and normal, even if you don't like it.
I remember a time when UIs looked consistent, instead of custom-branded, and I still think the "completely reasonable and normal" state is the former, not the latter.
As I remember, that was before the rise of multi-platform, web-based and mobile apps.
You'd get Office 2003 and it'd follow the Windows XP style with lots of blue [1] and you'd get Office 2004 for Mac with the brushed metal styling [2] - and many applications only targeted a single platform.
Whereas in the modern age you get Slack for Web, Slack for Windows, Slack for Mac, Slack for Linux, Slack for iOS and Slack for Android - and it tries to be consistent across different platforms, instead of being consistent with different platforms.
This type of writing is very grating on the nerves. It's not AI slop, but it feels the same way, where AI slop is trying to trick you into thinking every sentence is the pinnacle insight of human endeavor of all history, this writing stops every single sentence to say "Are you outraged? I'm outraged! You should be outraged! This is outrageous!"
Especially when the outrage is that the user didn't follow instructions to use sudo on an uninstaller that needs to touch root owned files.
The writing style has a name called ragebaiting. The gold:
> Localization files for every language on Earth
Yeah because English is the only one language that matters. Let's fuck up all the non-native speakers to save, I don't know, 50kb of text files? How could one frame this as a bad thing?
> Help documentation with 40+ screenshots in 10 languages
Seriously how Anglocentric could this author be? Even physical products have multi-language manuals nowadays.
Well I once watched an sysadmin with 430 years of experience swear his way through an installation process. Until I, back then a intern, pointed out that maybe reading the install instructions would have been a good idea, since there were some steps in there that would have saved us some time. We scrapped everything and reinstalled following the instructions and 15 minuted later it worked.
I admit that I also often deviate from installation processes, but only when I really know why I want to do that. And I tend to read the instructions first.
But I know people who are snuggly proud about not reading the manual and I really don't get it.
> 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 useless, I'm not going to waste my time reading it". But not the ones who are proud of not reading manuals, that doesn't make sense to me either.
I feel like the complaints here are…not really Samsung's fault?
> So I’ve dug around and found a cleanup script buried six folders deep inside the app bundle. Let’s try to run it:
> sh ~/Library/'Application Support'/Samsung/'Samsung Magician'/SamsungMagician.app/Contents/Resources/CleanupMagician_Admin_Mac.sh
> It ran. And my kitty exploded. Sweet kitty overflowed. Hundreds - literally hundreds - of lines of chown: Operation not permitted.
I mean, if you read on, you'll find that most of the things that were removed were from system folders that are owned by root? Presumably this was run without sudo…
> I rm -rf every Samsung folder I could find. The Preferences. The Caches. The LaunchAgents. The LaunchDaemons. The kernel extensions. The crash reports.
…that's where you put your stuff on macOS. Would you prefer that they picked some non-standard location you had to dig up?
> Package receipts in /private/var/db/receipts/ (Samsung left its receipts behind like a burglar leaving a bunch of turds in the living room)
This is again for your benefit so you know what was installed on your system
> Cached processes in /private/var/folders/7v/<your username hash>/C/ (yes, Samsung is in there too)
That's getconf DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR
> 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.
That's just how kernel extensions are on Apple silicon
> I feel like the complaints here are…not really Samsung's fault?
I don't know man, the last time I uninstalled an app on macOS, all I had to do was drag it to the trash. If you find this procedure sane, then I don't know what to tell you.
Samsung is responsible of how users interact with their app, including its install and removal.
* going into some internal directory and running a script based on the name
* deleting a bunch of directories
Seem like pretty bad ideas. Especially for software provided by a hardware vendor, which is probably a little clunky and inherently touches deep stuff.
But not including a removal script seems like bad form.
Edit: On the other hand, I don’t actually know for certain that the tool doesn’t have an uninstall script. Just, that the author didn’t find it. This seems worth noting because the author really wasn’t giving them the benefit of the doubt on anything, see all of the irrelevant complaints about animations.
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 interface, it would have asked for admin permissions and then done all the cleanup for him. The very cleanup that he complained about having to do by hand.
It's a .sh script, so he could have read it before running it. And when he saw "chown: Operation not permitted", he could have realized that the word Admin in the script was a clue that it needed, well, admin-level privileges, and he should try running it with sudo (after reading it first, naturally). I'm with you, I feel like this is someone who caused himself a lot of self-inflicted pain.
I mean, if he had read the script before deleting it (that's the third time I've mentioned reading the script, do you think I'm dropping enough hints?), he might have found a handy list of ... ALL THE FILES HE WAS LOOKING FOR. You know, all the 18 or so locations that he had to find by hand.
But nope, he didn't ... yes, I'm going to say it for the fourth time ... READ THE SCRIPT.
Parts of that article are just downright terrible.
First, the criticism of Electron is moot. Yes it's not sleek, but it's sufficient. This app is not supposed to be used heavily on a daily basis. Run it once to setup your drive, run it a few months later for a firmware upgrade or a quick health check and that's all. And when you had a taste of the absolute UX monsters some hardware vendors can produce on the software side, really an Electron app feels nice.
But it gets more ridiculous. Embedded fonts? God forbid companies enforce their own design guidelines in their software. Translations? Fuck non-English speakers. User guide with screenshots? The audacity.
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 that Finder had an open file handle into our application bundle until you either restarted Finder or restarted MacOS. Then, as long as you didn't start our application, you could cleanly delete it. (Thankfully MacOS cleaned this up with the Finder extension API about a decade ago.)
Having gotten familiar with internals of both Windows and MacOS... MacOS has its own set of gremlins too.
Maybe Samsung used that when naming their product.
I am old, but I miss the days when the install process was copy . to /<appFolder> and the uninstall process was delete /<appFolder>
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 are the exception, since they have to modify system folders to install.
Partition Magic was pretty awesome, BTW.
And the companies that make such products _never_ care about making sure an uninstallation is actually clean.
Due to "new and vetter" approach, each program puts its data in 5 different folders for "mutli user" reasons.
What is infuriating that all those folders are hidden and all of then are on C: drive.
So your C: drive gets clogged.
This makes it impossible to track how much space each program uses.
(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:)
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 existing in the first place.
Anyway, I kinda like PearCleaner for removing the cruft. It’s not perfect but it’s open source and one of the better options imo.
It makes me wonder why did large companies are investing so much in web and putting web devs to write disk utility desktop apps?
It's because in these environments where corporate cancer has metastatised, programmers are not in charge of hiring programmers, or much of anything when it comes to decision-making really. HR is composed of people who are not programmers. They are looking to hire people with a list of shiny hot new web stack keywords on a resume, because they have literally no other concept of how to filter candidate applications. So they end up with a bunch of hot React devs and nobody capable of making software that is fit for task.
buttons being jpegs is the norm
Not being able to simply remove a program like you would any other program is next level evil in my book.
You'd get Office 2003 and it'd follow the Windows XP style with lots of blue [1] and you'd get Office 2004 for Mac with the brushed metal styling [2] - and many applications only targeted a single platform.
Whereas in the modern age you get Slack for Web, Slack for Windows, Slack for Mac, Slack for Linux, Slack for iOS and Slack for Android - and it tries to be consistent across different platforms, instead of being consistent with different platforms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2003 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2004_for_Mac
Especially when the outrage is that the user didn't follow instructions to use sudo on an uninstaller that needs to touch root owned files.
> Localization files for every language on Earth
Yeah because English is the only one language that matters. Let's fuck up all the non-native speakers to save, I don't know, 50kb of text files? How could one frame this as a bad thing?
> Help documentation with 40+ screenshots in 10 languages
Seriously how Anglocentric could this author be? Even physical products have multi-language manuals nowadays.
I admit that I also often deviate from installation processes, but only when I really know why I want to do that. And I tend to read the instructions first.
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 useless, I'm not going to waste my time reading it". But not the ones who are proud of not reading manuals, that doesn't make sense to me either.
A lit of practices save you 10s each day but when they fail you lose 10 years’ worth of savings.
It was funny and helpful.
> So I’ve dug around and found a cleanup script buried six folders deep inside the app bundle. Let’s try to run it:
> sh ~/Library/'Application Support'/Samsung/'Samsung Magician'/SamsungMagician.app/Contents/Resources/CleanupMagician_Admin_Mac.sh
> It ran. And my kitty exploded. Sweet kitty overflowed. Hundreds - literally hundreds - of lines of chown: Operation not permitted.
I mean, if you read on, you'll find that most of the things that were removed were from system folders that are owned by root? Presumably this was run without sudo…
> I rm -rf every Samsung folder I could find. The Preferences. The Caches. The LaunchAgents. The LaunchDaemons. The kernel extensions. The crash reports.
…that's where you put your stuff on macOS. Would you prefer that they picked some non-standard location you had to dig up?
> Package receipts in /private/var/db/receipts/ (Samsung left its receipts behind like a burglar leaving a bunch of turds in the living room)
This is again for your benefit so you know what was installed on your system
> Cached processes in /private/var/folders/7v/<your username hash>/C/ (yes, Samsung is in there too)
That's getconf DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR
> 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.
That's just how kernel extensions are on Apple silicon
I don't know man, the last time I uninstalled an app on macOS, all I had to do was drag it to the trash. If you find this procedure sane, then I don't know what to tell you.
Samsung is responsible of how users interact with their app, including its install and removal.
* going into some internal directory and running a script based on the name
* deleting a bunch of directories
Seem like pretty bad ideas. Especially for software provided by a hardware vendor, which is probably a little clunky and inherently touches deep stuff.
But not including a removal script seems like bad form.
Edit: On the other hand, I don’t actually know for certain that the tool doesn’t have an uninstall script. Just, that the author didn’t find it. This seems worth noting because the author really wasn’t giving them the benefit of the doubt on anything, see all of the irrelevant complaints about animations.
I mean, if he had read the script before deleting it (that's the third time I've mentioned reading the script, do you think I'm dropping enough hints?), he might have found a handy list of ... ALL THE FILES HE WAS LOOKING FOR. You know, all the 18 or so locations that he had to find by hand.
But nope, he didn't ... yes, I'm going to say it for the fourth time ... READ THE SCRIPT.
First, the criticism of Electron is moot. Yes it's not sleek, but it's sufficient. This app is not supposed to be used heavily on a daily basis. Run it once to setup your drive, run it a few months later for a firmware upgrade or a quick health check and that's all. And when you had a taste of the absolute UX monsters some hardware vendors can produce on the software side, really an Electron app feels nice.
But it gets more ridiculous. Embedded fonts? God forbid companies enforce their own design guidelines in their software. Translations? Fuck non-English speakers. User guide with screenshots? The audacity.