i built this because at some point you start noticing a pattern
things that were genuinely good… slowly become worse. small devs ship something great, a company buys it, optimizes it into oblivion, and suddenly you're left wondering how a simple tool turned into a "what happened here?" story. CCleaner is basically a case study at this point, everyone knows, nobody needs another paragraph about it
funny enough, CCleaner only ever really survived because of the community around it, especially things like the winapp2.ini signatures (https://github.com/moscadotto/winapp2). that ecosystem did more for the tool than most official decisions ever did.
i was too lazy to rebuild all cleaners natively, so i just wrote a parser for that format instead. turns out its fast. like… surprisingly fast. faster than what i remember from the old piriform implementation (no idea why that was so slow, proprietary formats, overengineering, or just history doing its thing. doesnt matter anymore anyway)
the UI is built in WinUI3 you know, Microsofts "beautiful but slow" framework, except somehow it still manages to outperform the original. go figure
companies today dont really compete on making things better. they compete on who can add more noise without breaking everything completely. and somewhere along the way, "good tools" just turned into "things people remember fondly"
CCleaner used to be great. now it’s mostly a warning.
anyway, im not trying to fix the indutry. just wanted something that doesnt suck. i'll probably get bored, or it'll evolve into something else, and we end up back at square one like always.
for now i just called it FluentCleaner.
it wasnt even meant to be public, but a lot of genuinely nice people asked me to release it, so i probably will here's a first preview so you can get a feel for the direction. i might end up funding it through donations, we'll see.
if you like it, cool. if not, also fair
