Because you have an external 3rd party authority on your machine which decides what you’re allowed to run. The message itself is problematic, because it is worded to be manipulative.
“YOU WERE IN DANGER! But we saved you!”.
I have Linux Mint running on another PC, it’s been sitting there for years and never caused me a problem. Meanwhile with each windows update I’m unsure if the OS will try to commit suicide again. I had windows break after updates multiple times.
There are distributions other than LFS, Slackware and Gentoo.
I want power tools. Microsoft has been busily trying to turn windows into a shiny toy. In the process they also made it less comfortable to use. Locating specific settings was easier in older versions. And now I have adverts in start menu on top, which require voodoo in order to disable them.
Also, even if you have to compile software, it can be worth it, if the end result will faithfully work for you forever. Instead of randomly breaking, randomly creating a mess and so on.
Annoyingly they are rather expensive, at least relative to potential development costs and sale price. Sure if you are making a game and expect to get at least a few thousand sales its not too bad and a cost of doing business. However they are impractical for demos or free applications.
I’m not even sure they do anything beyond a trust system? I don’t think anyone actually validates your app that is signed isn’t malware, so they cost a lot of money with no actual effort from the signing companies. Though I guess that explains the cost as its basically ‘insurance’ against bad actors, though even then I doubt any user would get a pay out for using malware that is EV signed.
Plus ‘March 2024, Microsoft changed the way MS SmartScreen interacts with EV Code Signing certificates. EV Code Signing certificates remain the highest trust certificates available, but they no longer instantly remove SmartScreen warnings.’
The only silver lining I found when looking into this a few months back was that if you release via the Windows Store, Microsoft will automatically sign that version of the app for free. Well not exactly free as I’m sure their are other costs like a dev account for Window store, but you get the idea.
Weird as I always see the warning, and looking at the unziped files properties, they all inherit the ‘blocked’ property. The only way I found to avoid that was to remember to remove the ‘blocked’ property from the zip file before decompressing.
Maybe 7zip does something special, its hard to remember as I usually switch between windows unzip, winrar and 7zip depending upon needs and lazyness. Otherwise I wonder if there is some windows setting that controls it?
I get a good chuckle from that warning being called stupid in a thread about how it’s unsafe to run arbitrary software.
As far as I am aware the warning can be controlled or suppressed to some degree by signing your software with an appropriate certificate. My research into this was some time ago and somewhat limited. I think that the “easy” solutions change the content of the warning and identify the software developer. To make it go away involves clearing higher hurdles, or having the executable used a lot online without negative reports, as I think @Ryiah ahready raised.
But seriously, that warning is real and legitimate. It’s annoying, but it is in no way “stupid”, because these risks absolutely are real.