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Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

Foobar2000 is also in the microsoft store which avoids a load of 'find the right download button that isnt an ad pretending to be a download button' nonsense

https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9PDJ8X9SPF2K

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Personally, I hate this attitude. Using a big corps walled garden just for a tiny bit of convenience. With just a tiny amount of effort you can find reputable places to download software. But most people have your attitude and now pc's have become like consoles, where a big corp monitors all your activity and decides what you can and cant do with your machine, and the idea of the pc as a personal universal computing machine is dying.

Reminds me of the Benjamin Franklins qoute

"Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."

Just replace security with convenience. Also, yeah thats super melodramatic, but it is qualitatively the same imo.

If you don’t want Microsoft knowing what you do use Linux. If you’re in Windows the store is the way to go for installing software.

It doesn't even provide any convenience, because it's more difficult to figure out the correct url https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9PDJ8X9SPF2K than to find a download button.

Eh? I don't think there are any issue with finding download section on foobar homepage and installer link.

You're probably right but in general it's a problem with downloading windows software

  choco install -y foobar2000

Are people actually using chocolately?

I never could get over the way they get you to install it with the equivalent of piping curl into. Or the way it kept advertising the paid version, which is really disconcerting when something has become effectively the only way to manage what software you have installed (or will be eventually).

If the limitations of the free version and/or the pestering bugs you, consider looking into Scoop.

I use both. They complement each other (Scoop has a smaller repo). Topgrade runs both (and Windows Update) in one command.

I do.

But to your second point, I don't think of chocolatey as a package manager to rely on. I just see it as an alternative download location, and uninstall the software through the Control Panel later.

It just seems like a big red bullseye, hack it and have your spyware spread to a lot of computers

they haven’t had a package injected with malware is impressive

If its good enough for Wendell Wilson (Level1Techs), its good enough for me.

https://chocolatey.org/packages mentions download numbers for each package, which seem to indicate people do use it.

We use it via the ChocolateyGet PS provider. I.e. installing most software (but not all) is now just 'Find-Package foobar' and 'Install-Package winamp' etc.

I've been using it for years, it drastically reduces the pain of setting up Windows machines and it has at least 90% of the software I want. I would recommend it to any technically competent user.

Only if you don’t have adblock

I think having a MS account connected to your OS is also a problem.

http://www.foobar2000.org/ however is a pretty straight forward site.

Also to add, a new feature in Edge is copying Chrome style browser sign in. If you sign into the store, it gets added to your OS level accounts. Then Edge sees that and signs you into the browser. Google got enough shit for signing into Google in Chrome signing your Chrome installation into your google account.

Also if you're not paying enough attention, the default signing into the Windows Store is to turn your local Windows login into a Microsoft Account login.

I'm not sure I feel any safer downloading from the microsoft store given some of the items that show up in search results. I don't think it's reasonable to assume something is trustworthy just because it's in the Microsoft Store.

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