You may want to check out Chocolatey, https://chocolatey.org/ it’s a package manager for windows. Install chocolatey gui to geat an easy way to work with it. It works fine via powershell, you just need to learn the commands. They have tons of info on there sight. Good luck and enjoy
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
111 points (97.4% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35810 readers
1594 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Note that while chocolatey is a package manager in some sense, unlike "proper" package managers, it relies on the individual apps' Windows installers to execute the actual installation functions.
It also contains tonnes of unfree software; it's just a repository for installers afterall.
This is a good response and worthy of being the top answer, however I feel the need to point out that it isn't actually what OP is asking for.
F-Droid specifically only hosts open source software, in fact it builds that software itself, it is t just another store or package repository.
Chocolatey does not build the applications it deploys and in fact contains plenty of closed source, proprietary and paid for software. It's a fantastic tool and I use it a lot myself, but I wanted to be explicit that it's not analogous to F-Droid at all.
WingetUI. Uses Scoop, Chocolatey, and Winget sources.
This is absolutely brilliant!
Ninite is awesome
Been using ninite when doing a fresh windows install for years now!
I still use it on nearly every new Windows install (including when helping others setup). Although Ninite itself is not FOSS, it has many of the best open source Windows software in its curated list.
Choco is pretty good but it does have less packages than say, brew.
As someone who has packaged for Mac's with brew and RPMs and debs on Linux, packaging for windows is a total pain. Choco uses nuget 2 for self hosted repos which means you need to run a server for your packages, which there are things like the PPAs for Linux and Brew uses GitHub releases so you don't need to host anything yourself to provide binaries.
This is also on top of windows needing extra work to develop for, because windows filesystem works differently enough to need code specially for windows. All of this means that windows users suffer on the open source software front.
I feel like everyone moved from chocolatey to winget now that Windows has an official package manager.
no choco works better
How so?
is it that surprising that a third party does something better than microsoft?
A little bit, because you won't explain HOW it works better...
It wouldn't necessarily be surprising, but I've used both and I honestly couldn't say which one I prefer. That's why I hoped you would elaborate.
Not really, but it would still be more helpful to explain how it's better.
Yeah, I liked Scoop more than Chocolatey.
What do you like more in Scoop vs choco? I use Choco assuming it would have more packages and would be updated more often since its more popular.
How do people like scoop and chocolatey better than winget? Winget is thousands of times more reliable and useful to me.
Winget.. literally just acts as an installer downloader. Scoop and Chocolatey actually maintain repositories.
Not to mention Scoop offers a lot more Unix tools that winget won't. Also it stores everything cleanly in a single folder in your %userprofile% and never requires admin privileges.
Also, winget serves more proprietary software than FOSS, which is something OP cares about.
And creates huge fucking issues by not using the actual installers and doing user installs in many, many instances. Winget just works, which was my entire point.
And I've seen little to no important FOSS projects that weren't available from winget, which you'd know if you'd actually try it.
For me, Scoop feels faster and I also don't have to remember/find the package name of what I want to install.
If I want to install Everything, I just type scoop install everything. I wanted Everything, it installs Everything. Easy. If I try winget install everything, no. I have to remember the author as well and type winget install voidtools.Everything. It's just a bit annoying.
Plus, I know where all my software is with Scoop. Windows installers love flinging files all over your system, but with Scoop they're all in the apps folder. It's not always the case, but I trust Scoop apps to stay where they are more than Windows installers.
You can 100% use winget install [softwarename] if it doesn't collide with another piece of software of the same name.
And throwing everything in a user directory causes tons of issues that I've seen when something is expected to be installed the way Windows needs it to be.
Is there a reason you use Scoop instead of Chocolately?
I tried Chocolatey first, but ended up using Scoop after a while. It's been years so I can't remember why, but there was something about it that annoyed me enough to make the switch.
No installers unless absolutely necessary.
Backups are simple, all user data in a single folder.
Quicker checks for updates.
Scoop
Windows users generally don't care as much about using open source software, so there isn't really an audience for such a place.
There are a ton of great FOSS for Windows. Even before I moved to Linux as my primary OS, I used many of these because they were often just better than the proprietary alternatives.
Mine as well just @ blender for this lmao
Oh, for sure. I do like using FOSS and Windows is my primary OS (for game compatibility reasons), but I'm saying that the number of Windows users who care enough about FOSS to seek out an F-Droid equivalent is very low, which is likely why nobody has bothered to build one yet.
Windows has billions of users, I guarantee you more than a few care about FOSS.
Also FOSS repos for Windows do exist, as explained in other comments here.
I feel like a lot of people might like Foss, but still use FOSS. Sometimes you might need it for work/school but still want as many FOSS apps as you can get.
Analogy: A lot of people that use FOSS apps on Android aren't running GrapheneOS
If it was easier to find FOSS stuff on windows, I think more people would use it and care about it.
Maybe not your typical users, but a lot of open sourced software us Linux users enjoy have Windows versions easily available.
That was what i feared, yes
F-Droid does a lot of vetting to help users avoid anti-features and other abuse.
Windows has anti-features built right into the OS, so on that platform such vetting is kinda pointless.
So, no, not really.
android has anti-features too, not ppintless
Android with play services*. Degoogled phones are dumb as rocks and some people like em that way
If by dumb as rocks, you mean not wasting obscene amounts of battery to tell Google all the details of my existence, yes, I do like that.
Linux
Seriously, if you care about foss - fuck windows off.