So a post on the site actually has me re-thinking some of our terminology -- specifically around the term "stealth". It's interesting simply because the term has been in use for so many years and now I wonder if it was the wrong one. The idea pre-dates my work on the site, but it's something I'll consider.
Anyway here's the full post in case the site goes offline or the comment gets dumped ...
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Ultimately portable software is more broadly a response to behavior by good software on many platforms throwing information, settings and other garbage all over the computer. (Android is maybe the worst at this but Windows is guilty too.) Over time that wastes space, slows down the computer, and is a privacy concern because you're not in control of your own data. That means unless you encrypt the *entire* hard drive, you can't be sure what someone who finds the drive will know about you.
By this reasoning, to call something "stealth" isn't about subterfuge — it's about not throwing junk all over the drive. I'm actually wondering if we picked the wrong word; I thought about calling it "registry green" for a long time now, but I got stuck on the fact that it's about more than just the registry.
Generally speaking, being self-contained and keeping most changes to the local machine restricted to the local folder means *better* portability, which is why "stealth" or "registry green" status is ideal. Programs are *less* portable when they write to the registry, AppData, ProgramData, C:\WINDOWS etc.
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