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Comment by Touche | Hacker News Reader

What is wrong with the state of software on Windows? Whether it is download pages containing 4 or 5 Download links that are really just ads or "partner downloads" for crapware, it's just really difficult to get software on Windows.

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Chocolatey, https://chocolatey.org/, "Package Manager, somewhat like apt-get, but built with Windows in mind". This will be the package manager bundled with Powershell in Windows 10, I think.

Still, I prefer standalone installers. Neither Ninite nor Chocolatey offer choice of a location for installing a package, and I prefer to keep large/IO intensive apps installed on my HDD, not on a tiny SSD.

OneGet [1] will be included in W10, probably with Chocolatey as an optional package source.

A big thank you to @fearthecowboy over at Microsoft/Outercurve for sticking with OneGet since it was called CoApp.

[1]: https://oneget.help/

I had some troubles with putty using chocolatey. It didn't install it 'traditionally', instead executables were added in a weird places and linked back to the PATH. Other than that chocolatey was quite enjoyable.

Curious what advantage that gives. Isn't quickly loading big programs what SSDs are for? That's why I got one. A program shouldn't be writing to its program files folder if you're worried about large amounts of data building up there.

I keep all my games on a huge, slow 2TB drive rather than an SSD because SSDs are expensive compared to HDDs, and they're also smaller. And modern games are big. I keep Windows on the SSD and the big files on the HDD.

I prefer choosing my own install location as well. For me, Portable Apps works well for several different applications. No worries about something quietly installing spyware and, since the applications are portable, I can put them in my Dropbox and have them available across my many different Windows machines.

Plus, I really appreciate the simplicity of having the install / uninstall of programs involve moving folders around. One less thing which could potentially break one day.

Steam can be configured to install applications wherever you want. Hopefully they'll have feature parity in this department.

It's not just Windows anymore either... http://www.howtogeek.com/210589/mac-os-x-isn’t-safe-anymore-...

Try ninite, https://ninite.com/

The problem is the culture of freeware and shareware is so engrained that it was impossible for them to truly get their app store online. As a result, even people writing good software have to compete with free software that's embedded with spyware/adware, and the average user has no idea. So they're given an option of something "completely free" that does what they want, or something they may have to pay $5 or $10 for. The choice for them is easy, because they don't know any better.

Windows is not very user friendly like that. ;)

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