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.
You may want to check out Chocolatey, https://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
Note that while chocolatey is a package manager in some sense, unlike “proper” package managers, it relies on the individual apps’ Windows installers to execute the actual installation functions.
It also contains tonnes of unfree software; it’s just a repository for installers afterall.
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.
WingetUI. Uses Scoop, Chocolatey, and Winget sources.
This is absolutely brilliant!
Ninite is awesome
Looks interesting! But you forgot a link https://ninite.com/
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.
Maybe opensourcealternative.to
Wow. I love alternativeto. This is a cool tool if it’s good!
I’m guessing that is similar in function to osalt.com?
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.
no choco works better
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.
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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.
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ReactOS Application Manager (RAPPS) https://reactos.org/wiki/RAPPS
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
If by dumb as rocks, you mean not wasting obscene amounts of battery to tell Google all the details of my existence, yes, I do like that.
Linux
Seriously, if you care about foss - fuck windows off.
