Point of No Return

Point of no return

I've somehow managed to get to the point where my operating system and general computing environment has become a bit crufty. I really hate to have to do it but I think I'm going to have to start from a fresh installation. There are many Applications in Activity Monitor which I can't remember installing or probably shouldn't be running. UserEventAgent is nicely colored red and is apparently "Not Responding", as is coreaudiod. I have the ability to track these things down, but I don't have the time or motivation because I know why these things are in this state.

This brings me to a question which I'm not sure I've seen discussed before. The cleanup of post upgrade and uninstalled applications from MacOS. When your system is littered with years old plists, drivers, application enhancers, general hacks and such. I have found that there is no tool sufficient to clean all of these locations where files reside. I find this to be frustrating. Tools such as AppZapper do a fair job at cleaning things up, but I find this to be more of an infrastructure problem.

It would be nice if Apple supported uninstallation. According to the Apple documentation regarding the limitations of Managed Installs the Installer application does not support uninstalling products.

It would be pretty simple to include a manifest of files and.. oh nevermind, instead of duplicating the features of many package management systems already available lets just adopt an open source tool like dpkg. Lets top dpkg off with a really slick looking front-end designed by Apple. Lets also figure out a way to let users place applications where they want but maintain the ability to uninstall them even if moved by the user after install.

Sounds complicated but such are the adventures of software giants.