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Comment by davvid | Hacker News Reader

If you're looking for a package manager on Windows, you might be interested in Chocolatey: https://chocolatey.org/

Chocolatey has some slightly-awkward-feeling freemium thing going on; there was a good discussion of Windows installer stuff recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15791781

https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop/wiki/Chocolatey-Compari... (scoop) is an option focused on dev tools, http://boxstarter.org for repaving dev/vm machines.

Proprietary https://ninite.com for normally-installed stuff, not sure if the free edition updates things.

Free edition of Ninite only installs 32-bit applications, unfortunately.

Thanks for the heads-up, it's been quite a while since I've needed it.

How has this limited your experience so far? I'm not really well-versed on even the expected impact this has on commonly used applications... is there any?

Well, no one wants a 32-bit web browser, and IrfanView 32-bit cannot handle large files well, I can't remember if the JRE has a 64-bit mode in the free edition but probably not.

In general you will also lose stability and/or performance with complex or intensive applications. For many suites like GIMP, Blender and LibreOffice this is a deal-breaker for me.

It looks nice, but the whole paradigm of installing software by copying and pasting commands into a root shell is terrible.

And I say that realizing it's only a step removed from downloading an installer and running it, but still.

I've always used Cygwin for installing packages I need on Windows. Unfortunately it doesn't turn it into a proper unix, but it can only do so much under adversarial circumstances.

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