I find it quite hard to find open source software for windows. In time i might switch to linux, but for now i am stuck with windows 10.
Is there some reliable place where you can search for open source software?
Or is it that devs usually just don’t bother with windows?
EDIT: everyone, thank you so much for your input! I will check it all out. Yes, of course windows is evil, and i hope/expect to switch to linux before windows 11 comes around, but i still need it for a few programs, unfortunately. Once these come with a linux version - which is in the works - i can make the switch. Degoogling/demicrosofting is a process and i’m working on it.
Have a great weekend and thank you for the time to answer my question.
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 trywinget install everything
, no. I have to remember the author as well and typewinget 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?
No installers unless absolutely necessary.
Backups are simple, all user data in a single folder.
Quicker checks for updates.
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.