I installed Arduino IDE on Windows using arduino-ide_2.3.4_Windows_64bit.exe.
10 minutes later I decided to uninstall it. After it was done I discovered multiple directories left under AppData/Local and AppData/Roaming. More than 5 GB of space!
What did I do wrong? Why did it leave so much garbage?
You did not do anything wrong. But uninstalling does not clean up everything, it only uninstalls the application.
These are the directories that I'm aware of
C:\Users\yourUsername\.arduinoIDE
C:\Users\yourUsername\AppData\Local\Arduino15
C:\Users\yourUsername\AppData\Roaming\arduino-ide
C:\Users\yourUsername\AppData\Local\arduino
C:\Users\yourUsername\AppData\Roaming\Arduino IDE
And the sketchbook folder; usually C:\Users\yourUsername\Documents\Arduino
If you want TOTAL uninstall use a 3rd party uninstaller.
Hi @sterretje, @sonofcy
thanks for the replies! Did not expect the Arduino IDE to have such significant room for improvement after so many years of history. I would have skipped it straight away knowing of this shortcoming.
It's fairly common, I have not seen many apps totally clean up after themselves, even my Mac is quite bad
It's still very bad practice even for open-source software. Leaving couple of KBs might be OK. But leaving 5GB of data... It clearly indicates they don't care. I found posts from 10 years ago where people had exact same issue.
Yeah, I noticed the same thing when I uninstalled it! The uninstaller doesn’t remove everything, especially cached libraries and settings in AppData. I just manually deleted the leftover folders to free up space. Not sure why it leaves so much behind, but it seems pretty common.
It has not got high enough on the issues list. Since it has no effect on code produced, or user experience it will remain where it is. Another factor is the place for the cleanup code may be in a 3rd party open source module and doing that uses more manpower and has very little payback. If possible, put yourself in the shoes of the development manager with hundreds of issues for user experience like the serial problem(s), new features and code generation bugs and you will quickly learn you will never have enough human resources to get to that part of the list.
As a software engineer I totally understand that an open source project has to balance priorities and authors don't owe anything to users. But ability to uninstall is a basic capability users expect and any decent software should implement it.
I think a following warning would do the job: "Please note that you will not be able to uninstall this software and it will occupy 5 GB of space permanently. An experienced user can do a manual clean up using this guide (link)". Or at least adding word "beta" next to the title...