I recently installed chromium, created a new user and logged into a website. After my work was done, I removed chromium with “sudo dnf remove chromium”.
A few days later I installed chromium again through dnf. My user account was still there and I was logged into the same site.
Is there a way to avoid this and uninstall an app along with all its user data?
If you install something as a Flatpak, you have that option.
And Windows absolutely does not remove everything after an app is uninstalled.
(In Windows) If you uninstall a program using the “uninstall.exe” provided, you can tick an option to wipe all the data.
This is also available from the Control Panel’s “Uninstall programs” page. The “uninstall” button usually launches the “uninstall.exe” provided by the app’s devs.
I’ve never had this issue on Windows before
That is at the discretion of the developer who packaged it up. Linux is designed to NOT do such things by default, and is therefore more resilient to “oopsie” moves.
Yeah It’s more reliable in that way.
Still, I wish there was a something like a simple flag for the package manager so I could control if user data gets preserved.
I’m a bit surprised that that isn’t a feature.
Package management isn’t intentionally separated from running code operations for a reason. If you want to do something specific like this regularly though, just write a simple two like script that handles it for you: 1) uninstall 2) rm directories.
Yeah, if the dev provided an uninstaller, if that uninstaller really does clean everywhere, and if control panel finds and executes that uninstaller – which in my experience it very often doesn’t.
To me the Flatpak way is better. But yeah, maybe system packages not doing it can be annoying sometimes. I just take issue with you saying it’s not an issue on Windows when it absolutely is, and is IMO worse there.
Here’s an example. I removed avast via the uninstaller on a relatives computer, it made it laggy as hell. I restart after as the uninstaller demands, but it was still there.
Searching, I find this official support option. https://support.avast.com/en-us/article/10
The official Avast Uninstall Tool, the tool to use when the included uninstaller didn’t work.
The official uninstall tool didn’t work either. I ran it in safe mode, like it said. Didn’t work, either, but it removed some stuff, and finally let me delete some things manually. Ran it again in safe mode after that, finally seems to have removed everything.
Anyway it’s a great example of if a company doesn’t know what they’re about, windows has no process to recover from that. Window’s process is identical to a Walmart employee saying. “I dunno, man, contact the manufacturer.” Genuinely, its usually enough, but when its not, there’s absolutely no recourse.
In the last I had very little success rate of those uninstall tools to actually do their job in full. A lot of time they delete some data but almost always they leave some trash behind.
And in the first place, I stopped trusting those external uninstall binaries, they could be designed to remove not only app data but remove your personal data, steal data from your PC or infect it (even if just to investigate why you are uninstalling).