[everforward]

Adobe's shenanigans are bad, but I put a lot of the blame here on Windows and its persistent refusal to implement a decent way to uninstall programs without using a vendor-provided binary/script.

It boggles my mind that Windows has no concept of "track what files and registry entries are from what apps, so we can uninstall apps even if the vendor is an asshole/malware distributor/etc", and the corollary "a page that shows what apps still have files or registry entries on the system".

This is worsened by heavy use of the registry, which allows apps to spread files all over the filesystem in a way that is very difficult for users to follow. It's further worsened by the uselessness of Task Manager (it's nearly unfit for purpose, especially considering the bizarre number of strange processes running on even a clean Windows install). Then add in opaque things like svchost.exe and it's very, very hard to tell whether there are any processes left over from an install.

Windows really needs to add better uninstall or cleanup tools for that kind of stuff. Maybe a way to audit what files and registry keys apps access, so users (or a tool) can cross-check them after an app is uninstalled. Maybe some kind of "this app has been running in the background but you haven't interacted with it in X months" info display. Maybe some kind of "you uninstalled app X but I found a folder named X in %appdata%" tools.

It really gives Windows a bad name that no one can trust that uninstalls of apps actually work.

[Maskawanian]

> I put a lot of the blame here on Windows and its persistent refusal to implement a decent way to uninstall programs without using a vendor-provided binary/script.

While the install & uninstall process certainly be criticized. The fact remains that the uninstall script is made by Adobe. They deserve credit for all dark patterns that script contains.

Other systems have similarly opaque places where configuration can be left. Look at dot file structures, gconf, et al. on linux. As well as Preferences, extensions, input managers, Library folders on Mac.

Until we get a system that is entirely containerized, this will continue to be an issue.

We should probably keep the focus on Adobe lest we distract from their bad practices.

[everforward]

I agree that they deserve all the credit for the dark patterns in their uninstall script and people should be pissed. I just also think this was an incredibly obvious outcome, and would not have been a problem at all _if Windows hadn't handed them sole authority to uninstall themselves_.

This isn't even a new issue, I remember jokes about how hard McAfee was to uninstall like a decade ago. Adobe deserves hate for abusing a loophole, and Windows deserves hate for creating and maintaining that loophole through who knows how many issues with it.

> Other systems have similarly opaque places where configuration can be left. Look at dot file structures, gconf, et al. on linux. As well as Preferences, extensions, input managers, Library folders on Mac.

I can't speak for Mac because I lack the context, but there are like a dozen ways to deal with this on Linux. strace, iotrace, selinux audit mode, lsof in a loop if you're lazy and don't care too much, there are some tools built for basically this that use fanotify, I think sar might include this with the right config.

It's like moderate difficulty to write a shell script that will print all the files a process accesses, and trivial difficulty to consume the same.

It's also worth pointing out that a filesystem doesn't typically get "bogged down" the same way the registry does; i.e. there being unused config or cache files on the filesystem doesn't typically harm the filesystem in the same way that having useless entries in the Registry does. There's ups and downs to that kind of centralized config service.

> Until we get a system that is entirely containerized, this will continue to be an issue.

You can do this on Linux already for many things, depending on how much you need it to be isolated and what it does.

In the simplest manner, jails or chroot is probably enough to isolate most applications' filesystems; I'm doubtful they even try to break out of them.

Selinux could be used; first run it in audit mode to generate a list of files it's allowed to access (and record the same), then set it to enforce on the app to prevent other access. AppArmor might also work, not sure.

I believe snaps and/or flatpaks can have their "filesystem" isolated to certain paths.

Docker containers are an option, or just regular old cgroups.

The most basic and common option on Linux is just to install and run it as a separate user. There are certainly ways around that, but most of them would require either giving the installer root access or the kinds of filesystem permissions that malware dreams of.

[brokenmachine]

>I put a lot of the blame here on Windows and its persistent refusal to implement a decent way to uninstall programs without using a vendor-provided binary/script

I agree that this would be nice, but which OS does have this functionality?

Android and I presume iOS are the only ones I can think of.

Linux has .deb packages, but when you run the app it can still do whatever it wants across the filesystem. Just uninstalling the .deb after that isn't a guarantee that everything has been removed.

[everforward]

Distro-maintained packages (not just .Deb but rpm, pacman, etc) do fulfill this, but generally not via an automated means. It relies on package maintainers manually testing or reading source code to figure out what to remove. They don't just blindly accept whatever uninstall script comes with the software.

They don't remove everything, but I consider their choices generally sane. I.e. there are good reasons to not remove Postgres' data when Postgres is uninstalled. People would be pissed if they tried to switch from Ubuntu's packaged version to somebody else's Postgres repo, and Ubuntu deleted all their data when their Postgres was removed.

Linux has the functionality to do this via stuff like fanotify or kernel extensions like selinux. I don't believe this is an issue of "can't be done", I think it's an issue of "distro maintainers do a pretty good job and selinux is clunky". Windows and MacOS might as well; I don't know enough to say either way.

I think Windows has a particularly hard job here because of the proliferation of proprietary binaries, where they can't audit the source code even if they wanted to. Most stuff in Linux repos is open source and can be audited, and I think (could be very wrong) Google Play and the App Store expect to be provided with source code so they can do their own build.

[spacecadet]

Use geek uninstaller on windows, it nukes it.