Provocative title, I know, but it's something that's been on my mind lately. It just seems like PortableApps.com isn't as active or as productive as it used to be, and nor is this site. In general tech discourse, I don't hear as much talk about portability and I don't hear much complaining when an app isn't portable.
Have people just kinda given up on the concept? Have they realised that with the mainstreaming of the Windows Store and apps using CEF, which spreads its data everywhere, even in portable modes, that the situation is becoming increasingly worse rather than better? There are also several tentpole apps, like Steam, that'll never be portable, so I could see some people saying "well, whatever, in for a penny, in for a pound". It also seems like Linux may've taken a bite out of the portable apps community, as a lot of people interested in portability are also the kind of techies and power users who have been or are becoming appalled by Microsoft over the past decade: starting with Windows 8 but really ramping up with 10 and 11 and then going supernova with the true EOL of 7 (among whom I include myself). A not entirely insignificant number of them are now multibooting Windows purely for gaming and productivity edge cases (the two uses where portability is both least important and least available).
I don't fully understand the reasons but it just seems like the community is a lot smaller and a lot less cohesive and that increasingly fewer people in the wild care about portable apps, even though the problems that they (can) fix (the utter mess that is the registry, reinstalling on soft-bricked systems etc.) are becoming more relevant than ever with the increasing complexity of Windows and its proneness to (often fatal) errors. W7 was ten times more stable than W10, in my experience: I've had a Thinkpad serving local FTP running W7 nonstop (no restarts) for five years now and the GUI is still perfectly usable, which has led me to believe that Linux fanboys were previously hyperbolic about the stability of good OSs like W7 in their enthusiasm to promote Linux. Sure, they're correct now, but that's why I'm running Linux on most of my systems now, which, I guess, means I'm also one of those people who no longer have such an intense investment in portable apps.
Hopefully people who've been around this forum for many years - on which I've only ever been a sporadic lurker - will have a more accurate, ground-view perspective of the trends.
Have people just kinda given up on the concept? Have they realised that with the mainstreaming of the Windows Store and apps using CEF, which spreads its data everywhere, even in portable modes, that the situation is becoming increasingly worse rather than better? There are also several tentpole apps, like Steam, that'll never be portable, so I could see some people saying "well, whatever, in for a penny, in for a pound". It also seems like Linux may've taken a bite out of the portable apps community, as a lot of people interested in portability are also the kind of techies and power users who have been or are becoming appalled by Microsoft over the past decade: starting with Windows 8 but really ramping up with 10 and 11 and then going supernova with the true EOL of 7 (among whom I include myself). A not entirely insignificant number of them are now multibooting Windows purely for gaming and productivity edge cases (the two uses where portability is both least important and least available).
I don't fully understand the reasons but it just seems like the community is a lot smaller and a lot less cohesive and that increasingly fewer people in the wild care about portable apps, even though the problems that they (can) fix (the utter mess that is the registry, reinstalling on soft-bricked systems etc.) are becoming more relevant than ever with the increasing complexity of Windows and its proneness to (often fatal) errors. W7 was ten times more stable than W10, in my experience: I've had a Thinkpad serving local FTP running W7 nonstop (no restarts) for five years now and the GUI is still perfectly usable, which has led me to believe that Linux fanboys were previously hyperbolic about the stability of good OSs like W7 in their enthusiasm to promote Linux. Sure, they're correct now, but that's why I'm running Linux on most of my systems now, which, I guess, means I'm also one of those people who no longer have such an intense investment in portable apps.
Hopefully people who've been around this forum for many years - on which I've only ever been a sporadic lurker - will have a more accurate, ground-view perspective of the trends.
Statistics: Posted by influx — Thu Aug 29, 2024 9:53 pm