I remember there was a folder for a Windows marketplace game that I spent a good couple of days trying to get rights to access so I could mod the single player game contained inside. But no, Microsoft had a folder on MY OWN computer locked down tougher than Fort Knox. That was Windows 10 iirc, I can't imagine how much worse it's gotten, I switched to Linux completely a couple years back.
I got write access once to that folder, but I never found a way to do it without breaking EVERYTHING connected to the Windows store lol Photos app - borked, fucking Calculator - borked, random settings panels - borked, Game Pass - borked
I was eventually able to put Humpty back together again without reinstalling windows, but it never was quite right until I did. It was not a pleasant experience lmfao
Yeah AppX is a different kind of application platform that was built to be secure. Breaking that security breaks functionality. What's lame is that they don't have mechanisms to allow you to change permissions at a granular level and then change them back to defaults. You have to hack it and deal with the consequences which is just bad design.
Appx is locked down tight on purpose. It's built to be a more secure application platform than exe.
Not saying it's right and you should have to deal, but that's why.
Editing to say I also went Linux last year and I love it far too much to ever go back to Windows. Flatpaks are similar to AppX but at least you can customize the permissions for them. Still I find them to be a bit of a pain to use for some apps.
I just feel there is a glaring flaw in Appx, in that if you ever need to try and troubleshoot a piece of software or need to access the application folder in anyway for any reason, it's effectively blackwalls it. Or at least, it's not worth the amount of effort and compromise required to bypass it.
Flatpaks are way better than Snaps, but I feel AppImage's do a much better job of modularizing executables and their libraries into an easy to run package. I just wish there was a decent piece of software for management of installation of them.
I use Pop_os on my main computer and recently have been getting back into NixOS and been working on writing a full configuration file for it.
I hear a lot about those distros around here. I recently settled on openSUSE Tumbleweed after having used Fedora and ZorinOS for a while. It's so good, I haven't thought about switching to anything else. Manjaro, Pop_os, and NixOS are on my list if that ever changes.
I like AppImage a lot and I wonder why that didn't take off like Flatpak did. A timing issue, perhaps?