[thereddaikon]

That makes managing a user's application specific data difficult though. For one you have different user's data intermingling which potentially causes new problems. But on top of that you make managing and backing up that data more difficult. As it works now with appdata you can back up a user's profile folder under C:\users and get everything they have assuming they haven't gone out of their way to save data to a strange place. If all data for an app lived in program files then backing up and restoring that data becomes much harder.

[whoisthemachine]

Ideally a new instance of the application is installed for each user. This also provides better isolation if one user upgrades/removes/breaks their application instance. I, for one, have really come around to the AppImage model [0] in the last couple of years.

[0] https://appimage.org/

[thereddaikon]

I don't like the solution being to just make containers out of everything. That introduces its own problems and lets developers be lazy in other ways.

[pbhjpbhj]

I guess the OS keeping track of .../programs/NameOfProgram/user settings/NameOfUser is just impossible? Or having an app install create a link in /users/NameOfUser/program-config/NameOfProgram to the config folder is equally impossible magic ...?

[thereddaikon]

That's asking a lot of windows. But as a former sys admin, that sounds like it would make things harder to manage. So its linked. But its not really there. So existing userdata backup automation wouldn't catch it. Sorry your Outlook psts are gone. User data should live with users. The problem isn't with that paradigm. Its that its abused and wide open.