Posted by chalmovsky 5 days ago
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
It was at win8 where everyone just noped out and just started doing whatever they wanted. XP/2000 was the last era where anyone really cared.
I agree with all your points except this. Disk utilities have a long history of magic-themed names: PartitionMagic, Disk Wizard, Magic Partition Resizer, the list goes on. Samsung is doing whatever everybody else does and is naming their tools based on user expectations.
Since then I've been using Corsair and WD Black drives, since Samsung has gotten overpriced and hasn't seemed as reliable the past few years. That application was one of the reasons.
> 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
* 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 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.
Clearing the package receipt database of stuff you want to uninstall is fucking neurotic, I'm sorry, but it just is.
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.