Am era when you could download whatever software you wanted to your device without going through a draconian app store.

An era without walled gardens.

People had websites and blogs.

The technology was bolder. The algorithms used to accomplish heavy lifting were cooler.

It was the wild west and it was free and exciting.

Today we live in a plastic, enterprise, software as a service monoculture. The wild and free part died.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I hate it.

Your comment reads like the first few lines of a manifesto I'd gladly sign.

My comment was a bit rhetorical but I do remember that period well, as a regular user of DC++, uTorrent, Kazaa and others. It's just that the contrast hits you fresh in the face after several years of getting used to bloated web, .NET, UWP, flatpak apps, it is refreshing to install a full-fledged application consisting of a single binary less than 3 Mb, and whose UI doesn't treat me like I'm a mobile-totting child.

I wish we had more programs like this. They could breathe new life into older or less powerful systems, and get along better with multi-tasking (using several simultaneous Electron apps on a small or mid-tier system brings it to its knees while these computers would still be considered insanely powerful just a decade and a half back).

Hey, don’t hate on .NET!

Windows Vista and up shipped with .NET 3 and .NET 2.0 was a one-time install for Windows XP that enabled devs to ship complete GUI applications with network, file system support, OS integration, COM integration, and more in a single 100KB binary.

UWP is, of course, a different story.

uTorrent comes to mind, when it first came out people where mostly running Azureus and 90% of the network switched over within weeks. Can't beat a single file distribution of under 1MB.