I just cleared out nearly 100 GB of data from about a dozen old games I Uninstalled years ago. WITCHER 2 and 3, DOS 2, Mass effect, xcom 1 and 2, Herizon 1… and more, all left up to 30 GB files after using game Uninstallers.
In: Technology
Aside from the answers you’ve already received, there’s another one:
People find it mildly annoying when your uninstaller leaves some things behind. People get very angry when you uninstaller deletes things it should not delete.
So uninstallers are often written to be conservative, and only delete the things it can be absolutely sure the installer put on the disk. If it comes across a file that it’s not absolutely sure about, it just leaves it. Patches and similar can render the files not quite the same as the installed version, so to be safe they don’t delete it.
There’s multiple examples of uninstallers not being that paranoid, and then rendering the computer unbootable when they deleted something they should not have.
That’s one reason I love Linux, when you uninstall something via the terminal, at least from my experience, it does a great job at purging most things
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