Submitted 8 months ago by Papanca@lemmy.world to [deleted]
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?
WingetUI
This is absolutely brilliant!
Ninite is awesome
Looks interesting! But you forgot a link ninite.com
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.
Linux
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.
Maybe not your typical users, but a lot of open sourced software us Linux users enjoy have Windows versions easily available.
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.
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
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.
Wow. I love alternativeto. This is a cool tool if it’s good!
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 does everything cleanly in a single folder in your %userprofile% and never requires admin privileges.
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.
Scoop
ReactOS Application Manager (RAPPS) https://reactos.org/wiki/RAPPS
bearded_zero@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You may want to check out Chocolatey, 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
Kushan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.