What We Learned Reviewing 400 Listings This Year

Every twelve months we run a full pass over the catalog. Every listing is opened, installed on a clean VM, checked against its current release notes, and evaluated against the same rules we use for a new addition. Anything that has drifted comes off; anything that has quietly improved gets a note.

This year's pass removed 27 listings. Fifteen were pulled because the publisher started bundling installers or shifted to a paid-with-nag model. Eight were pulled because the tool has stopped receiving updates and now has a known compatibility issue on Windows 11 24H2 that will not be fixed. Four were merged into other listings.

On the additions side: we added 62 entries this year. Most came from reader submissions we followed up on; a smaller portion came from internal editor picks; the rest came from finding old bookmarks in a browser sync that led back to tools we had forgotten about.

The categories that grew fastest were Privacy Tools and Portable Apps. The category that shrank was Desktop Enhancement — a lot of older wallpaper and theme utilities have not survived the Windows 11 transition.

Further reading: Wikipedia — PDF format overview.