Unity Hub 0.18.1 cannot uninstall manually-removed Unity version

The original source of this problem was my own pilot error, which I accept, but Unity Hub didn't handle my mistake very gracefully, so I wanted to report that.

I just started using Hub a few days ago, and my existing environment has about 6 different versions of Unity installed from the traditional installer downloads. I figured out how to make Hub aware of these, and the invocations were working fine.

I had used Hub, whatever version was before 0.18.1, to install Unity 2018.2.0b11. Before installing 2018.2.0f2 today, I wanted to delete the beta. Out of habit, I did that manually without telling Hub to uninstall it first. Oops. Bad idea, but I forgot that version was Hub-installed.

Once I did that, Hub could not uninstall the beta that was already deleted, and restarting Hub didn't get rid of it out of the list of "on this machine" Unity versions. Since I had used Windows Explorer to delete the beta, I thought I could fix this by restoring it from the Recycle Bin, which I had not yet emptied. That didn't help; Hub still could neither run nor uninstall that version.

I spent some time in the Registry Editor trying to figure out where Hub stored the list of known installs, to no avail. Finally, I emptied the recycle bin and then downloaded the Unity Hub setup executable and ran it again. This reset the list of installed versions and seems to have cleared up the problem.

During all of this, I also noticed that Unity Hub does not (yet?) appear in the list of programs that can be uninstalled from the Windows 10 settings menus.

The suggested behavior would be that if Hub is told to uninstall an editor version that no longer exists due to external factors, it should just issue a warning about that, but go ahead and remove it from the menu, rather than issuing an error and leaving the item (now known to be useless anyway) in the menu. This also seems sensible given it's very easy to re-add a "discovered" version of Unity editor if necessary.

 

No apology needed -- I knew I was testing out pre-release code and wasn't expecting perfection. It's not a high-priority bug, by any means. I like Unity Hub overall and am now using it as my go-to way to start Unity and manage my installs. Thanks for the reply.

 

Thanks for looking into this! Here are the test results, including some extra things you didn't specifically request:

• For Unity that was installed from the standalone downloader, then deleted from Windows Explorer:
  • Unity Hub does not detect the change if I just close its main window and reload.
  • Unity Hub does not detect the change if I use the tray icon to Quit Hub and then reload.
  • Unity Hub does allow me to "remove from list" the deleted version, and works correctly after that.
• For Unity that was installed from the Hub's embedded downloader, then deleted from Windows Explorer:
  • Unity Hub does not detect the change if I just close its main window and reload.
  • Unity Hub does not allow me to "uninstall" the version if I just close its main window and reload.
  • Unity Hub does automatically detect the deletion if I use the tray icon to Quit Hub and then reload.
  • After the preceding bullet point is done, the notion of uninstalling becomes moot.

In short, Afshinity, I can confirm that your hypothesis is correct in my test environment.

As an aside, until you posted to this thread, I was utterly unaware that the tray icon existed, because by default it was hidden inside that little Windows popup panel rather than being actually visible. I'll change that in my Windows settings to make it always visible. That might be something to consider in terms of documentation or UI improvements for the future, to make new users more aware of this icon.