Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall

I worked on a disk utility in the 90s called PartitionMagic that was one of the first ones to let you dynamically resize disk partitions.

Maybe Samsung used that when naming their product.

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

> 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. Ran find to confirm they’re gone. Shut down AGAIN. Booted into Recovery Mode AGAIN. Ran csrutil enable. Rebooted AGAIN. All this just to delete four dead files and their mirrors from a disk utility.

This one is entirely on Apple. It was Apple who decided that "root isn't good enough" and that you, the user, shouldn't be able to administer your own goddamn system as root, without performing backflips while singing Happy Birthday.

Years ago I shipped a MacOS product. If you deleted it, you would get an error emptying the recycle bin (or force-deleting the application bundle if you did an rm -R to it.)

Why? Well, at the time Windows Explorer had an API for extensions, but MacOS didn't for Finder. We needed to add some menu items to the context menu, which on MacOS required reverse engineering Finder and injecting code into it. This then meant that Finder had an open file handle into our application bundle until you either restarted Finder or restarted MacOS. Then, as long as you didn't start our application, you could cleanly delete it. (Thankfully MacOS cleaned this up with the Finder extension API about a decade ago.)

Having gotten familiar with internals of both Windows and MacOS... MacOS has its own set of gremlins too.

I think the most obscene thing here is that macOS is now littered with permission prompts for camera, background execution, etc, but makes no effort to stop even industry partners from spraying the disk with dozens of files that can’t be removed easily.

About ten years ago, I bought a low-end Samsung TVZ, intended to hold me over until OLEDs got into a non-silly price range.

Based on that TV, I will never buy anything from Samsung again. It had, get this, a _variable audio lag_. Audio might be nearly in sync, or might lag by a couple hundred ms, depending on the TV’s mood at the time. Just incredible that they ever thought this was a reasonable thing to sell.

For personal reasons I am avoiding all Samsung products and over the years it seems like I unintentionally dodged one annoying issue after another.

> An entire Electron framework - yes, they embedded a full Chromium browser engine to show you a pie chart of your disk space

Ram is cheap and unused ram is wasted ram

- Samsung management

It's comic when reading but for sure this is tragic. I _have a feeling_ that bloat will continue increasing in the next years.

It makes me wonder why did large companies are investing so much in web and putting web devs to write disk utility desktop apps?

If you're installing Samsung Magician for firmware updates, keep in mind that you can always update your firmware without using it and it's just as safe.

Hey, I'm only 3 months into attempts to clearly uninstall MSI software form my laptop, so i can reinstall it (it refuses to install atm), because it seems to be the only way to...... set the battery charging limit.

Man, that is actually hilarious. Also reminds you that "Big Tech" doesn't necessarily build great stuff. They sell well, but are they built well? I don't even want to know how Microslops stuff looks behind the scenes :)

it all makes sense if you know how Korean software is like.

buttons being jpegs is the norm

Is my understand correct that if I install an app with homebrew cask and then uninstall it everything should be gone, or not even with the homebrew cask would everything be uninstalled?

this reminds me, I still have an ancient version of iTunes on my old win7 box because something got corrupted at some point and now I can't uninstall it.

Not being able to simply remove a program like you would any other program is next level evil in my book.

I empathize with many of the complaints, but some are a bit ridiculous. Using custom fonts in software UI is completely reasonable and normal, even if you don't like it.

Uninstalling malware takes extra steps and multiple reboots

Having experienced exactly this situation, I was lucky I kept automated backups and went back an hour or two after I installed it. TimeMachine ftw.

I hate how Mac OS makes it harder to delete than to add stuff to system folders. I forgot what was it, but adding something worked with sudo, removing it required disabling sip. Is there a reason for that?

I 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

The last time I booted to a windows drive on my prior desktop was to update the firmware on a Samsung NVME SSD drive to prevent premature failure. Was kind of a pain for even that task as I hadn't been running Windows for about a year at that point... in fact my insiders build of windows was so out of sync it wouldn't even update anymore. Meh.

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.

> What kind of fucking name is that anyway? “Samsung Magician” - for a disk utility? Who greenlit this? Who sat in a meeting and said “yeah, Magician, like it does magic”

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.

Absolutely agree I hate that software. Last I remember I was trying to upgrade firmware I think of either a usbc drive, but could have been some m2 nvme drive via usb4. Software looked so nasty that I think I managed to get it somehow working in a VM for firmware update.

This is a great reason to choose an alternative.

I recently tried to install Samsung magician on Windows 11. Tried. It flat out doesn’t work, tried some basic remediation and internet searching to figure it out, but could not get it to run at all. Completely nonfunctional. Seems to be an issue with some electron configuration or command line args. I gave up because it wasn’t worth more effort, but I believe it when I read that the software is a dumpster fire.

This type of writing is very grating on the nerves. It's not AI slop, but it feels the same way, where AI slop is trying to trick you into thinking every sentence is the pinnacle insight of human endeavor of all history, this writing stops every single sentence to say "Are you outraged? I'm outraged! You should be outraged! This is outrageous!"

Especially when the outrage is that the user didn't follow instructions to use sudo on an uninstaller that needs to touch root owned files.

It reminds me of a lot of Windows software, especially virus scanners and supposed antimalware tools, going back 20+ years.

samsung magician managed to help me clone a hdd to a ssd on windows with ease

On Windows, you run the uninstaller, click once, and a few seconds later everything is uninstalled. You reboot to remove any remaining files immediately, or you can just wait until the next time you naturally reboot and it happens then.

This has been how it works in the Windows world for several decades. Surprising that Apple still hasn't figured this out yet.

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"I took an 'app coding' course in college".

It’s always the dummies who don’t know what they’re doing who write long screeds about how bad something is. The first indication the OP is a dummy was using “sh” to run the Samsung uninstall script instead of just invoking it directly, then not realizing he should’ve sudo’ed it. This is not a defense of Samsung, their software sucks, but this over the top.

Parts of that article are just downright terrible.

First, the criticism of Electron is moot. Yes it's not sleek, but it's sufficient. This app is not supposed to be used heavily on a daily basis. Run it once to setup your drive, run it a few months later for a firmware upgrade or a quick health check and that's all. And when you had a taste of the absolute UX monsters some hardware vendors can produce on the software side, really an Electron app feels nice.

But it gets more ridiculous. Embedded fonts? God forbid companies enforce their own design guidelines in their software. Translations? Fuck non-English speakers. User guide with screenshots? The audacity.

> Localization files for every language on Earth - [...] - Samsung really wanted to make sure everyone on the planet could experience this suffering equally

Why are you considering localization as bloat? I bet your reaction wouldn't be positive if your native language(s) were missing instead.