Uninstalling Applications, Incorrectly

I started volunteering at the local Makerspace as the IT Guy (official title).

I inherited 15 laptops, all running an OS that were running, let’s say (since I dislike naming names) a closed source Non-POSIX operating system. The computers were so poorly maintained that it took several minutes to boot, and the Start Menu took 30 to 45 seconds to open, and each sub-menu of the Start Menu took 30 to 45 seconds to render and open. Each.

30 to 45 seconds each.

Add to that frequent crashes general laggy-ness, and the computers were basically un-usable for any kind of real work. This is not my opinion, but the opinion of the users and instructors. They pleaded with me to Make Everything Better (that’s a sys admin term which roughly translates to, after it hits the ears of the sys admin, “install Linux”).

I partitioned the drives and installed Linux on at least (sometimes more) half the drive. That solved most day-to-day problems, maybe because Linux is better or maybe because I know Linux and can maintain it properly.

The “other” OS was still needed, mainly because some people wanted it as a safety blanket (purely psychological) but also because there were some vital applications that drove some heavy machinery which everyone was assuming would only run on that OS. When I offered to attempt an install on Linux using WINE, they confessed that they also did not know where the install discs for the stoftware was. To be clear, they did not have the install disc that was their sole gateway to being able to use equipment that cost over 10 thousand dollars. This is why they needed an IT Guy volunteer…

Anyway, to help the “other” OS run a little smoother (and also to ensure that people didn’t use it for anything BUT the heavy machinery applications), it was decided that I should remove as many of the excess applications from it as possible, leaving only the essential apps.

And that’s when I found out that whomever designed this operating system’s application management had obviously never actually used (much less managed) a computer before.

This is What Bad Application Management Looks Like

Note: I’m not complaining about this. In real life, this does not affect me; I have no emotional investment in it. I don’t use this OS and it’s not open source, so I have no professional or personal investment in it. This is purely to detail how a [wildly ubiquitous] OS manages applications…horrendously. In other words: if you are ever looking for an OS to use and they do anything like this OS does when it comes to uninstalling applications, keep looking.

• There is no way to uninstall several applications at once. This requires a third party application.
• Some third party applications attempt to install [more] bloatware during installation. Yes, to do a batch uninstall of several applications, you must install one new one AND dodge offers for more.  (Remember when the internet had pages that spawned new pages when closed? and how that drove you nuts until Firefox fixed it…even though it wasn’t even their problem? This is a lot like that, except the company causing the issue by including broken tools isn’t bothering to fix it, and hasn’t since…1980-whatever.)

• Even with third party uninstaller apps (the $0 ones, anyway) a batch uninstall consists of endless confirmation dialog boxes for EACH app you are uninstalling. So if I select 70 applications to uninstall, I still have to sit there in front of the computer to confirm the uninstallation of EACH one. Sometimes several times per application. This renders the ability to batch uninstall wholly meaningless. (You know how on Linux you can just batch uninstall apps, and if interaction is required you can pipe <span style=”font-family: mono, courier;”>yes</span> to it to automate responses? yeah you can’t do that here.)
• Confirmation boxes vary from application to application (because they are uninstallers included with each app, so they are entirely dependent upon the developer). This means that you might be clicking just one button to confirm, or you might have to specify what action you want to take (“repair” vs “remove”, and so on), or you might simply have to confirm several times that you really really want to uninstall. And good luck in guessing where all of these buttons are going to appear within each uninstall interface.
  The best so far, though, was a particularly hairy bit of bloat(mal?)ware that required, literally, a CAPTCHA in order to uninstall itself. (At this point, you are shouting that these computers should just be re-imaged, but remember that the client has no install discs for either the OS or the essential apps that they run on the OS. Cheers.)
• Several applications just flat-out fail to uninstall. Some claim that they require access to the internet in order to uninstall, some claim not to have registered correctly and therefore cannot be removed, others just don’t uninstall. In these cases, I’ve gone back into the OS’s native single-app uninstaller and removed the offending apps again and that seems to work, mostly, sometimes.
• Some confirmation boxes randomly launch browser windows. It is not uncommon, during an uninstallation session, to have 15 to 20 windows spawned just over the course of 3 or 4 uninstalls.
• Usually an “uninstall” seems not to mean a complete uninstall, even though I have used a total of three different applications in an attempt to achieve an actual uninstall. If it’s not random system files then almost 100% of the time an uninstalled application leaves behind at least an entry in the Start Menu. If I select the application from the Start Menu, the OS offers to remove the entry for me, but that’s another manual process that I am not going to deal with. It’ll sort itself out eventually.

How Bad Is It, Really?

I freely admit that there may be secrets to doing this action that I just don’t know. In other words, if I was an expert on this particular OS, I’d probably be able to finesse the process (well, I had better be able to do something, or else why would I call myself an expert at the OS?). I am not willing to invest the time and effort to learn a closed source OS that only permits me to rise so high before I hit the pay-to-play ceiling (after which I’d hit the proprietary ceiling beyond which there is no passing).

And that’s the real crime here. It isn’t that the OS is bad or not user-friendly, it’s just not open. And if I don’t own the code, then I’m not going to learn the system. It’s just not a smart investment for me.

What would be a smart investment for somebody is to get their application management ironed out. I know the OS is only 30 years old but it might be time to start acting like a grown-up.