I wonder how many users that have uninstalled VMware still have 30 gigs of unused VMs lying around on their disk.
It would be "unbelievable" if a multibillion company decided to be helpful and erase your data just because you deleted the binary that created them (actually, it wouldn't, but let's not digress into how those companies are stripping away our agency by mobile-ossifying everything).
The whole Mac idea was that there's no "uninstall process" with opaque windoze registries etc; what the Finder shows you is simple enough for an average user to understand. Like dragging an "Application" or a CD-ROM into the Trash to get rid of it. Of course they ruined all that with ~/Library/{Preferences,Application Whatever,Kitchen Sink}/.
Turns out your UNIX with a human face ate its children afterall. With relish.
Also, "uninstallable" means "cannot be installed"
Thanks for demonstrating your lack of credibility.
Uninstallers by and large only do the reverse of what an installer did by going through the install log and undoing what it did.
This means any additional files made after the the installation that weren't properly appended to the log, any additional information added to the Registry that weren't properly appended to the log, and any user files created after installation (eg: save files) will not be touched by the uninstaller.
Should everything be properly logged for clean uninstalling? Yes; Linux package managers are a decent example. But reality is not ideal, so we have to deal with practicality. This presumably is the case whether it's Windows, Mac, or Linux.
Nor do most linux programs remove dot files when they go away.
Reaching into another account‘s home directory to remove stuff feels very intrusive.
Which would mean that any uninstall trying to also clean out library data is going to be incomplete.
I think the consistent behavior of always keeping it is a win
I dont mind the per user settings crud, I do mind the system wide crud, because it can make reinstating the app to resolve an issue fraught, and I have to go manually find whatever opaque keys were set and remove them.
I think I agree that the default behavior should be to leave all that data on the user's system. But I also think that apps should have some kind of associated file manifest, which you can use to automatically clean up after the app, or at minimum get a definitive list that you can go through manually or with a script.
It turns out that Apple installer packages do include a manifest (cutely called a BOM) of package contents, but users don't typically keep package installers around after completing installation successfully, and it says nothing about files that may be written by the app itself while in use.
I don't see how you could possibly claim that the user library "ruined" anything. Most apps need to save some kind of settings and/or transient data files. Where else would they go?
There are two scenarios I want the cleanup to happen: 1) app is buggy and I'm trying to fix it by reinstalling from scratch, 2) I need to free disk space. Both are pretty rare, and in the second case I am already using a specialized utility like DaisyDisk to see where my space has gone.
> transient data files
/tmp? That gets actually auto cleaned up!
> settings
Maybe. Do we want macOS to introduce the concept of uninstall to shave a few of those kilobytes? Hoping programmers do not screw up with rm -rf /? I already hate it when I have to use an installer so that's a no from me.
You don't specify and it's highly dependent but in most cases when an app is misbehaving it's an issue with preferences. You can reset most apps with `defaults` without blowing away all its data. There are some intricacies with how macOS handles preferences, so you should avoid manually editing related .plist.
The case where I want it to auto clean up is where it is repeatedly broken and I never really got to using and configuring it yet. It's pretty rare.
Of course, `man defaults`. You can modify the preferences and potentially fix it, backup preferences, etc. Again I must stress that you use `defaults`, the .plist on disk isn't always accurate even if you terminate the app and reboot the machine.
> The case where I want it to auto clean up is where it is repeatedly broken and I never really got to using and configuring it yet. It's pretty rare.
There isn't really a one size fits all perfect automatic solution. Not all apps are good macOS citizens.
That's what the average end-user understands by removing an app from the system nowadays.
Because on iPhone the app is completely sandboxed. Think Docker, with virtualised OS paths, but on OS level. When Apple tried to introduce a very light version of sandboxing, the world was ablaze in pitchforks and torches.
When I delete an app on an iPhone, all its data is also deleted. Gone.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/441112/how-can-i-r...
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/332574/deleting-an...
It means both cannot be installed and can be uninstalled, depending on context.
The Windows registry is a simple key-value store, just like the macOS defaults system. Windows installers/uninstallers may create/remove some registry entries, but those are typically entries for file associations and the installed program list, and perhaps some global settings. But then the app is free to write its configuration data to any registry key it likes (usually ones named after the app), or to files in ~\AppData, or perhaps C:\ProgramData. It’s not much different to macOS in that regard. The uninstaller may offer to remove the stuff in AppData, or it might keep it as-is.
(~\AppData is a bit less messy than ~/Library, because there are only three folders in AppData where application folders could go, but Library has all these folders with various meanings.)
Soma macOS applications can use similar scheme, under ~/Library/Containers/$application-id, but for the user more difficult to know which one is supposed to and which isn't.
Nope. In writing, it's technically ambiguous -- it could mean both "can't be installed" or "can't be uninstalled" but to me it means "can't be uninstalled". In spoken language, it depends how you stress the first syllable and both could be used, I guess.
That's why if you want to denote the installability of something, you should use the nonambiguous installable-noninstallable pair and leave the word "uninstallable" for the "can't be uninstalled" meaning. AFAICT, whether you should spell it as "non-installable" or "noninstallable" (note the hyphen) is up to you.
Again, in my personal experience, uninstallable definitely means 2 in [1]: "uninstall-able". Pretty sure I never saw that word used as "un-installable".
* cannot be installed
* can be uninstalled
The Wikipedia link you posted agrees with that interpretation.
I think “can’t be uninstalled” would be “non-uninstallable”.
This makes it clear (or at least clearer) that “able” is the modifying suffix to the root concept “uninstall”.
For example on Windows if you grab a zip for an app and just put it in Program Files (or anywhere), run it then delete it there is nothing Windows does to clean up the files in AppData or entries in the registry.
Same on Linux if you grab a tar.gz, extract it to /opt and use it then delete it. All the data in ~/.config etc remains.
If the app developer providers an uninstaller it may clean up such data but that isn’t an OS feature.
There are many macOS apps that come with a pkg installer and uninstaller that cleans up in much the same way as an installer on Windows.
A little tip: if you use homebrew on macos you can use brew to force uninstall any application along with the zap argument and it will clean up most things. The app doesn’t have to have been installed via homebrew for this to work.
So if you wanted to remove Obsidian that you had manually installed using the dmg you could do `brew remove --cask --force --zap obsidian` and it will remove the Obsidian .app, plist, cache files in Application Support, etc.
You can also check the brew formula file which is just plain text to see exactly what it will remove during a zap which is quite handy.
Sure, but if they locked things down the way you’re proposing, people would absolutely lose their minds about the iOSification of macOS.
Many mainframe/minicomputer file systems support file expiry dates, which is an interesting feature which Unix missed.
In fact, App Store apps are guaranteed to do that (by being in a closed sandbox); that's why Apple has an uninstallation procedure only for App Store apps.
> specify in a manifest what files and where will them be stored, and explicitly specify it they should be automatically deleted or not after moving the app to the trash
macOS tries to do that, and developers cry that macOS is becoming more and more closed. In fact, macOS already disallows all apps (including non-sandboxed apps) touching ~/Documents and ~/Downloads except for specific exceptions that the user grants.
It reminds me very much of how they made fun of Windows Vista in the past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyGUrPxG1iM
I don't know what a better solution would be but I don't think this is it. And the documents and downloads folders are pretty arbitrary on Mac. Any user created folders don't get this protection.
I do love the way that sandboxed apps only store stuff in one folder in the ~/Library/Containers folder though. Even non-MAS apps that are sandboxed have to do that.
In fact the trick in this article doesn't even mention this, if you use it with a non-sandboxed app you're not guaranteed to uninstall everything for sure using this method.
"Please grant your refrigerator permission to store milk."
This happens even when deleting the app from ALL devices connected to my AppleID.
Of course any files saved in iCloud Drive or "On my iPhone" stay put, which users would expect.
I think the value of retaining the keychain is related to 1. automatically deleting least recently used apps and restoring them when a user goes to launch them, and 2. restoring from encrypted backups, in which the downloaded apps are not backed up themselves, slowly install after the restore completes, and find the keychain data waiting for them.
If I recall, not all methods of backup include the keychain, which I think was the difference between having to sign into every app again or just a few due to a new device's Secure Enclave. These days if you get a new device you'll have a much better time with the phone-to-phone migration assistant then a backup and restore.
It's sounds like a good feature, however,
> "But some things persist, like the app's related keychain data, which might contain a user session."
this is also functioning as a "super cookie". Once you've installed a Google app, Google will always know it's you. Even when reinstalling/using another account.
Apple should provide a mechanism to clear these items too, and prevent tracking users.
The OS doesn’t know what files that app created, thus can’t clean them up.
The only sane way to use desktop OS that I've found is to reinstall everything every 6-12 months and having some backup procedures to speed up configuration process.