alt Hacker NewsI 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
Replies
> 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.
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.
Also it doesn't take 18 steps to uninstall. The steps provided are the steps he took stumbling around trying to remove every trace of it, but it is in no way the optimal method.
Yeah, the two steps:
* 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.