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🛠️ Tool
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FluentCleaner is a modern Windows system cleaner built with WinUI 3, positioned as a clean alternative to CCleaner. The developer explicitly calls out how good tools degrade after acquisition, citing CCleaner as a case study. No spyware, no scareware, no dark patterns, no upsell garbage, no fake registry magic.
Technical implementation:
The tool parses the winapp2.ini format for cleaning signatures rather than rebuilding each cleaner natively. The developer chose this approach out of pragmatism, writing a parser instead of manually recreating cleaners, and discovered it was surprisingly fast. Faster than the original Piriform CCleaner implementation, in fact. The developer speculates this could be due to proprietary format overhead, overengineering, or historical architecture decisions, but acknowledges this no longer matters.
The community-maintained winapp2.ini signature ecosystem is worth noting. The developer points out that CCleaner's real value for years came from this community resource, which did more for the tool than most official Piriform decisions.
Built on WinUI 3, which the developer describes as Microsoft's "beautiful but slow" framework. Despite this, FluentCleaner reportedly outperforms the original CCleaner in the developer's own testing. No independent benchmarks confirm these claims.
Requirements:
• Windows 10 2004 (Build 19041) or later
• Windows App SDK 2.0.1 (must be installed separately)
Security warning:
The developer has flagged that fluentcleaner.org is not affiliated with the project. The only official source is the builtbybel GitHub repository. This is a well-documented attack vector: malicious actors create polished websites to distribute trojanized versions of legitimate tools. System cleaners require elevated privileges, making a compromised distribution vector particularly dangerous.
Context:
The developer describes a familiar pattern: small devs ship something good, a company acquires it, optimizes it into oblivion, and users are left with degraded software. CCleaner went from trusted utility to a warning about enshittification. FluentCleaner aims to be something that doesn't suck, at least for now.
The tool was not originally intended for public release. Community requests prompted the developer to share it. Funding model remains undecided.
Limitations:
On whether cleaning actually improves performance, the developer is straightforward: on modern systems with ample free space, you probably won't notice a dramatic speed boost. Microsoft's own documentation states that low storage can slow systems and block Windows updates, giving cleaning legitimate but bounded value.
Performance claims are based on the developer's personal experience. No third-party verification exists.
🔹 tool #FluentCleaner #Windows #systemcleaner #winapp2
🔗 Source: https://github.com/builtbybel/FluentCleaner