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[ Thank you for "PartitionMagic" - crucially important for home / personal computer users, at least in my own history. ]

And, I wonder if a (corporate) development organization's overall cultural friction around critical / negative feedback -- in this case integration issues in the technical sense of pulling together modules built by subteams to compose a final product -- could be worth investigating when challenging metrics like the above are identified?

This "18 steps" seems like a problem. And I wonder if it's a prioritized concern at SAM.

SNARK: The "magic" could be how corporate culture is communicated to users merely through usage of Samsung Magician.

When a user mode application on the Mac doesn't just allow you to drag the app into the applications folder to install, it's a red huge red flag.

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.

Partition Magic was indeed magic. Thanks for the great work you did on it!

PartionMagic was not A disk utility, it was THE disk utility!

I read the HN title and literally thought to myself “‘disk utility’? What, like PartitionMagic?”

Then this was the top comment.

Thanks for PartitionMagic; what a great program.

PartitionMagic was in every geeks toolbox back in the day, amazing and always reliable, saved so much time! Thank you!

Thank you for PartitionMagic!! I remember using it to undo whatever disk partitioning mistake I did when originally setting up a machine :)

> I worked on a disk utility in the 90s called PartitionMagic

PartitionMagic was a S-Tier windows utility. Thank you.

Oh I used that all the time, it was so awersome! back in the day it really felt like magic...

hey, thanks for partitionmagic, it was amazing.

Thank you for such a great product

I remember that! It was awesome!

Partition Magic was among the first utilities recommended to me by my more experienced water I got my first PC. It served me well for many years since!

Lots of Mac software is still like this minus possible leftovers in a few other folders for uninstall.

> I am old, but I miss the days when the install process was copy . to /<appFolder> and the uninstall process was delete /<appFolder>

I don't remember this ever being the case, even in times of DOS.

Windows is the same now.

Due to "new and better" approach, each program puts its data in 5 different folders for "multi user" reasons.

What is infuriating that all those folders are hidden and all of them 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 years since floppy drives were the A: drive... and yet we are still stuck with the primary disk being called C:)

I don’t understand. Any MacOS Finder that had an open file handle into an application bundle runs on the Unix version of MacOS, and that allows deletion of open files (the inode stays around until the process exits), doesn’t it?

Or did/does the Finder check whether to-be-deleted files are open? Or did I forget how older Mac file systems behaved?

> MacOS has its own set of gremlins too.

You can't really blame macOS for this one. Interesting to hear this isn't just a Windows thing though.

As a mac user for 10+ years that cycled about 7 macs for personal and professional use, I've used Finder about biweekly to click on the airdrop button..

You seem to be blaming the OS for how you broke it?

You can just turn that off once and leave it off if it bothers you.

Even most power users leave it on except for temporary situations like this because it’s a helpful security protection.

This is 100% by design and 100% a good thing. “root” aka uid=0 should NOT have unlimited privileges to permanently modify the deepest parts of the OS, as assuming uid=0 is done daily for routine operations. Modifying kernel level stuff should not be possible from this daily use privilege level. It’s an ancient holdover from unix time sharing systems that are approaching a hundred years old.

If you think it’s bad, you don’t know why it was built - google Chesterton’s Fence. You, the user, still have 100% ability to modify your system however you choose - if you first clearly indicate that you ARE the user, and not just some random-ass installer running under admin privs, which is a completely normal and common occurrence. A higher privilege level that is used to protect OS integrity is a wonderful thing. If you think there is a better or safer way to access it, please submit your suggestions to Apple, but don’t assume the guardrails around System Integrity Protection (1TR etc) are slapdash or unreasonable or poorly thought out.

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

It’s like they went backwards on this. The utility that handles .pkg files used to have a command line uninstall option.

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.

You often cannot even tell what the permission prompts are for. Sometimes they have generic names like a programming language is requesting something. Not sure what that’s about.

My in-laws bought a Samsung TV, and I swore them off when I saw ads on the menu.

Then I stayed in Hawaii for a while and my rental had a Samsung washer… it had a DOWNLOAD setting on the dial so I could hook up the app… for… washing clothes… it didn’t clean anything, it had a minutes long process of shaking my clothes about to get a feel for them before it bothered adding a lady’s thimble full of water… nope. I had never missed my speed queens so much.

Then I was at a big box store and their Samsung fridge with a tablet on the door locked up and hung.

That was three personal strikes.

> 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 metastasised, 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.

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.

Reasonable? That's subjective. I don't think it is, personally. Normal? Unfortunately, yes.

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!

Ever tried to uninstall an antivirus on windows? Or any program that does not want to be uninstalled? I've had programs whose uninstall.exe was no different than /bin/true.

On this point, Windows is no better than macOS: the OS relies on the goodwill of the developers to provide working uninstallers. The only protection is a world where the OS provider does the application packaging: Linux repositories, Mac App Store, Windows Store. And even then, apps are still free to litter your filesystem at runtime, unless they're heavily sandboxed. Then FlatPak it is, or iOS apps or Android apps. Not great.

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.

> 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.

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.

I completely disagree. I loved this article. I could feel the authors frustration and disdain for the software.

It was funny and helpful.

https://clonezilla.org/

While your point is valid, it makes an even stronger case that it should be easy to uninstall

Please tell me you're a Microsoft customer.

> The first indication the OP is a dummy was using “sh” to run the Samsung uninstall script instead of just invoking it directly

Well that's a novel way to gatekeep.

Stick to the part about realizing it needed sudo, because the other complaint is just ridiculous.

Zero percent of users require 100 percent of languages at all times.