alt Hacker NewsLots of possible reasons:
- You used a trial version of a software, or other time limited license, and want to keep the output from that around.
- You are upgrading and that particular app requires uninstalling the old version before installing the new version
- You run out of disk space and want to uninstall a game but don’t want to lose you’re progress
That’s just what immediately comes to mind but suffice to say any workflow will have legitimate counter examples.
User can back up files in all those cases, but if this is really an issue, the "data will be deleted" dialog can have a button to say no. The way it is now is the worst. It's so unclear what you need to do to actually uninstall something that people go download stuff to do it, often malware.