Post n° 18
I've always wondered what is portable for the PortableApp site, or rather: in my house, the concept of Portable has a different meaning. A portable program is a program that, contained in a folder (or in a zipped file), is transferable anywhere and, above all, can be extracted and executed (with a simple click of the mouse) and this without me having to install the program beforehand with some executable installer. In the video - located at the bottom of this article - I wanted to do a little experiment: take the LibreOffice file (processed by PortableApp) and extract it. If the program were really portable it would be extracted without problems and without complications. Instead, you can see that, in the case of the LibreOffice package, a warning has come out indicating this:
"Integrity Failure Notice: LibreOffice Portable has been installed or updated without using its installer and some critical files may have been modified. This may result in data loss, personal data left on a shared PC, functionality issues, and/or may be a violation of the application's license. Neither the application publisher nor PortableApps.com will be responsible for any issues you encounter."
Now I restate, if a program is defined “portable” it does not need any kind of supplementary (or preventive) installation, therefore the questions arise almost spontaneous: why must PortableApp have a sort of “property” on the files that it creates and/or distributes? If there is an installation process it is obvious that PortableApp introduces – into one's own computer – other (and further) files beyond those foreseen for the application (which should – instead – remain ALL inside that folder). As written above, the scope (and the principle) of a portable program, is precisely that of not “dirtying the computer” with files that go to sneak inside the PC and that then it is always difficult to eliminate (especially with the disaster of operating system that Windows is…).
Pubblicazione: Sabato, 19 Settembre 2026
