Software management on Windows is such a mess.

After decades of opportunity for improvement, it's largely gotten worse. Uninstall is too often a myth, and the majority of programs out there leave bits and pieces behind. These add up over time to bloat your registry, disk, kernel drivers, etc, degrading the performance and reliability of your computer. Multiple conventions for where things go makes it difficult to track down the bits. (Program Files? (x86)? AppData\[Local|LocalLow|Roaming]? SteamApps\common? ProgramData? System32/SysWOW64? Dozens of registry locations?)

So many installers require unfettered, administrative access to my computer with little indication of exactly what they intend to do (Litter my desktop with new shortcuts? Add shell hooks? Install a rootkit?) and no opportunity from the OS to consent your partial permission or retroactively examine the changes. (Don't miss that popup balloon about a new driver! Have fun parsing through all the noise in your event logs).

Even simple chores like managing file type associations became more painful somewhere along the way.

There's a reason professionals so often fall back to advising a reformat. Makes me miss the days when your program went someplace like C:\PHOTOSHOP and most everything for it was contained within.

It's easy to point fingers at individual software publishers (I've called out some incompetent ones) but mostly I blame Microsoft for failing to evangelize rigorously thought-through best practices and provide better tooling to make it dead easy for developers to get it right. I might be wrong about this, but the preview looks like a gimmick for finding and running installers. I would have liked to see improved methodologies, packaging tools, and end-user empowerment announced alongside it.

Hats off to folks like Nir Sofer and Mark Russinovich who've shown the world just how much you can pack into a small, single-file, zero-installation EXE that just runs when you click it.

I've been using the same computer for 10 years now (with upgrades to components like video, RAID controller, SSD's) and have over 700 programs installed on it. I use third party monitoring software [1] to capture a disk and registry snapshot before and after any installation (and often on updates). The machine is still nearly as snappy as the day it was built (yes, I benchmark!), but it's taken a LOT of ongoing work to keep it that way. I use other tricks, like locking down certain registry keys and folder locations which programs like to pollute (or where that causes breakage, using startup scripts to clean them out after the fact in a cat and mouse game). One big win was completely giving up on My Documents. I treat it like just another AppData, and organize the content I really care about elsewhere.

All that said, I really like that my Windows software still comes directly from the vendors. I'm not sure how I feel about distribution becoming more centralized under Microsoft's control. Part of me hopes to see a vibrant ecosystem of third-party repos emerge, while another part dreads the confusion about where to get a package that may entail.

I do have to give Microsoft credit for enabling third party tools to take care of some of the shortfalls they haven't. On more locked down platforms that's been more difficult.

[1] https://www.martau.com/