SMC Fan Control, iStat Menus, ...: as useful as these apps may be, I tend to avoid them now as they're not clean. They pollute your filesystem
as root, installing executables (and potentially other files, in places you don't necessarily know about) and registering system services that take up memory and CPU time, preventing cores from entering an idle state to save battery.
Their alleged uninstallation process (as if it was normal for such a process to even exist) always leaves traces. Trusty find + grep combo can only help you so much in these kinds of situations. You never know what kind of names the developers have given to their files (distributed and / or generated).
Basically :
- Any app / program that requires root privileges (to install, and worse, to run) and that is not provided by Apple should be avoided at all cost.
- Anything else has access to files owned by the user that runs them, so they could potentially spill cruft in $HOME. Commonly polluted: ~/Library/{Preferences,Application Support}.
Which means, only trust apps / programs that are either open-source (you can always check what they do by digging in the source code) or made by yourself, Apple or an OCD-driven person
.
EDIT: Forgot to mention the most important point:
Install command-line utilities (and some GUI apps) with a package manager like
Homebrew,
MacPorts or
Portage (Gentoo Prefix). All three compile from source and install cleanly in a configurable main directory (like ~/.homebrew).
