Have people given up on or stopped caring about portable apps on Windows?

[influx]

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.

[FileHandler]

Don't have the stats, can only account for myself. And I do care more than ever.

Even if the forum were less frequented — which I can neither confirm nor refute — I would not jump to conclusions about the popularity of portable apps.

My writing has exploded in recent years, messaging, forums, private and business demands, my overall typing load went up, fatigue kicks in, I might not post as often as I did. But I always read along and follow this forum closely. Diminished interest? Not me.

[stevegutry]

I only login about every 5 years or so, but I visit this site & PortableApps.com every day without fail.
Virtually every app that I use is a portable app.

[Midas]

It may be a matter of perspective: While I agree overall engagement may have declined here on TPFC, access has surely gone up, plus I see lots of programs offering native portability off the bat now (sometimes in botched ways, but hey, what do they say about beggars?), which wasn't the case when I first started caring about it... YMMV.

[Emka]

I only login about every 5 years or so, but I visit this site & PortableApps.com every day without fail.
Virtually every app that I use is a portable app.

I have also rarely logged in during the past years, but I visit this site every day to get updates and read along, moreover I use some apps from PortableApps.com.

More generally, I think for the average user, the number of use cases that make portable software necessary may have diminished over the past years. People now rather carry around their devices or use online services instead of curating apps on a USB stick. For me, it is just some kind of hobby. I could as well install everything. I just try to avoid it if possible.

[lwc]

I think:

1. There are less programs for Windows in general, as most new programs are for iOS/Android/Cloud. See how it took Meta years to make the WhatsApp desktop/online version not just a remote control for the phone's app, while in Telegram they casually actually added a new "feature" that blocks desktop/online usage without having a phone app. Meanwhile, news sites rarely recommend Desktop apps. Portable Desktop apps is thus a niche inside a niche.
2. While in PortableApps they just plain out cancelled the ability to submit new programs at all (either the admin adds on his own or nothing), in here it became super-super hard, but previously it was "just" super-hard. It's because there are less people in these forums - let alone logged in users, as was testified by multiple people in this thread. Meanwhile, there are likewise less people to keep existing listings up to date, so website/download links become obsolete, dates seem older than they are, etc.
   As a developer of portable apps, I can personally attest I have a couple of listings, but I dare not add more because I have neither the time nor patience to beg and bump in the forum to approve them. I have an active discussion with the admins about it, but so far nothing changed this policy of relying on multiple logged in forum users to read "please approve this" threads, and clicking the links inside them and then clicking to approve (which is a niche inside a niche inside a niche).

[joby_toss]

Influx is AI. Change my mind, influx!

[freakazoid]

Influx is AI. Change my mind, influx!

I agree with you joby!

[Andrew Lee]

Influx is AI. Change my mind, influx!

How do you guys tell? Frankly, most AI posts I moderate way belong to the "pretend I am interested and provide a summary of the app" type.

AI-or-not, I think it's an interesting question. My personal observation is unless you are schooled in the old way, or are more technically inclined, most people these days are more likely to gravitate towards app stores. I guess now that everyone has been brainwashed by smartphones and tablets, the app store mindset has truly become the mainstream.

Anyway, my point is the traditional way of manual-download-and-install itself is itself in decline, making the group of people who cares about portable apps even more niche. So maybe the topic could even be framed as "Have people stopped caring about traditional apps on Windows?"

[joby_toss]

No anger. no love, no soul coming from its words...
In fact, the text is written almost perfect, with much care not to attract too much passion. They want a response, but not a conflict. My guess is some human is testing this AI on different platforms, to see if he can get away with it.

[Midas]

Influx is AI. Change my mind, influx!

It didn't register with me because it made multiple sensible posts in different forums but in hindsight it appears likely.

Well, and at least for once it triggered an interesting topic, IMHO...

[Emka]

I didn't suspect influx of being AI. I am regularly confronted with AI generated texts, sometimes generated with the intention to deceive, and I think I've got a feel for it. If it is AI generated, there must have been some serious prompt crafting. Colloquialisms, elliptical sentences and so on are untypical, unless you know exactly how to instruct the AI to come up with that. The AI would also need enough context or sources to generate a text that is not totally bland and superficial.

[influx]

Lmfao! I mean, I get it: I'm sceptical of every article I read from a search engine these days, but it's actually very uncomfortable/disconcerting to be accused of being an AI in such a personal setting. In one sense, I'm complimented by the mechanical "perfection" apparently exuded by my posts, but in a much larger sense, I just feel kinda nauseated. I've never experienced this before (tbf, these accusations didn't really exist in earnest until a couple of years ago). In days past, my contribution to and influence on forums was considered calming, thoughtful, meticulous, inquisitive, and often insightful, which frequently resulted in me becoming a moderator or even admin of various fora of all sizes in the heyday of the medium (which has tragically now passed in favour of centralisation and software woefully underequipped for the task, like Reddit). Now, those same traits are seeing me pegged as artificial. It's a very disturbing experience and, more generally, epoch. And this is why I'm a luddite and quit my academic computer science career several years ago, after I stopped believing in what we were doing. I've never felt more justified than I do right now.

The reverse Turing test is real. At least some of you were smart and/or charitable enough to spot hallmarks of legit human writing. If any of you had bothered to put my posts into an AI detector, I'd imagine the results would be very unfavourable towards your kneejerk conclusions. I've been knocked for six by this whole thing and can't summon up individual replies to some of the good points made before the "AI" derailment. At least not right now.

ETA:
See post below.

[influx]

0% of text is likely AI-generated
AI-generated 0%
AI-generated & AI-refined 0%
Human-written & AI-refined 0%
Human-written 100%

Results on OP. The detection impresses me: nowhere near as much as original generative tools, since there's probably just some basic Bayesian probability stuff at its core, but still a heck of a lot. The fact that it recognised that I hand-type literally everything without spellcheck, Grammarly etc. is very impressive. If I had written my own model, I'd be fucking thrilled right now. And possibly considering selling undetectable student essays for extortionate amounts. :p

It seems we're as bad at the reverse Turing test as chatbots initially were at the real one -- hopefully we'll beat their time in achieving proficiency or else we're in for a rough few decades. The impulsive scepticism of all techies, especially those somewhat (and justifiably) scared of or put off by AI, including me, will take time to dial in on what modern AI text looks like, particularly as the hype train is just leaving the station and the new hermeneutics of suspicion is at fever pitch. Frankly, the (seemingly justified, based on the ~20% of Google first-page results "written" de novo by AI tools) paranoia has sent us all a little crazy. I wouldn't sacrifice that scepticism bordering on paranoia for anything, however, regardless of hurt human feelings, as I think it's going to become increasingly necessary in online literacy.

ETA:
This post: "0% of text is likely AI-generated", again. Do I need to append an AI generation estimate to every single one of my posts on this forum going forward? It seems like it's going to get very boring very quickly.. All of my posts thus far achieve scores of P(human) > 0.8 across two different detection algorithms -- and all but one are "100% human".

Now this has been established, can some helpful soul knowledgeable in the ways of PAF please answer the question in my other thread by way of penance for making me suffer an existential crisis? I have severe depersonalisation disorder and being accused of unreality is pretty much the worst thing you can experience in text.

[Andrew Lee]

Wow, this topic has evolved into something really meta