As mentioned earlier, I have been a Ubuntu and Mac user in the past a few years, but now I am using Windows 10 which is the standard OS of my new job. I like the package managers in *nix world, e.g. apt in Ubuntu, yum in CentOS/RHEL, and homebrew in Mac, and I would like to use something similar in Windows too.
And Chocolatey is exactly the one I have been looking for, it offers similar user experience as *nix package manager. You can install/uninstall/search/list/upgrade the packages and more just via command line!
To install Chocolatey, you have to have Powershell installed and run the following command in an administrative terminal:
@"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"
Once you successfully installed Chocolately, you can start to install the software via choco command. Here are two examples:
Install git via choco: choco install git
Search Python via choco: choco search python
Find out more about chocolatey: https://chocolatey.org
If you have SSD on your machine, then you might have a problem with diskspace as you won’t always have the ability to install packages to a different directory. It worked on packages like FoxitReader and it allows me to change its install directory but not for something like CCleaner. You could buy a licensed edition and then use choco install ccleaner -y –install-directory ‘D:\Program Files\’ but $96/year made me think twice.
Not a problem for me, sitll having 400G free on the SSD.