[AlexandrB]

This might be "old man shaking fist at clouds", but was crapware this bad before centralized app stores? I know it was out there - most famously stuffed into SourceForge downloads - but it didn't seem to be as prevalent. Though perhaps it's more a reflection of increased ROI from doing things like this in 2021 vs 2001.

[lotsofpulp]

It was even worse back then. At least with the App Store, I can set my parents free on it and they won’t get a keylogger or remote access tool installed unwittingly. Not to mention malware back then slowed the computers down to a crawl and was a pain in the ass if not impossible to remove. Now it’s just holding it and pressing the little x.

I remember that reinstalling Windows was a regular thing to do to get rid of the garbage.