Why I Built Endstate

My Lightroom develop presets, carefully built over years. MSI Afterburner overclocking profiles — but worse, the overlay. If you've ever configured an Afterburner overlay, you know: the sensor layout, the positioning, which metrics to show, the font sizes, the colors. It's hours of careful tweaking. Gone in one reinstall.

I'd keep a mental checklist. Sometimes a text file. Sometimes a PowerShell script that half-worked. None of it stuck, and none of it handled the settings problem. The apps were annoying to reinstall, but the configurations — the stuff that made my machine mine — that was the real loss.

I looked for tools. Ninite installs apps but only from a fixed list and doesn't touch configuration. Winget is powerful but it's a package manager, not a provisioning system — it installs, it doesn't restore. Chocolatey is aimed at DevOps. Microsoft recently added multi-app install packs to the Store, but it's limited to a small set of curated apps and again, install-only. None of these capture both your apps and their settings as a single, portable snapshot you can take to a new machine.

So I built Endstate.

Endstate captures what's installed on your Windows machine and how it's configured, then restores it on a fresh install. It's declarative — you describe your desired end state, and the tool converges your machine toward it. Apps get installed via winget. Settings get restored from portable snapshots. The whole thing is idempotent: run it twice, nothing breaks.

The engine is a Go CLI, open source under Apache 2.0. The desktop app is built with Tauri (React + Rust). It's designed to be transparent — your setup is a folder in Documents you can inspect, copy, or back up. No hidden databases, no cloud dependency, no account required.

It's still early. I'm a solo developer working on this through my company, Substrate Systems. But the core loop works: capture your machine, move to a new one, get your environment back.

If you've ever dreaded a fresh install, that's why Endstate exists.