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Instead of dowloading from Sourceforge (loaded with ads and its own devious 'installer'), CNET, Download, etc, there are no-crapware alternatives that offer mor
by Renaud 12y ago
Instead of dowloading from Sourceforge (loaded with ads and its own devious 'installer'), CNET, Download, etc, there are no-crapware alternatives that offer more management tools as well (remembering your list of apps across machines, automated updates, discoverability):
Ninite: nice, simple, installer: just select apps and let the installer do it all for you.
AllMyApps: all the apps, no crapware (at least for now).
chocolatey: a command-line package manager for Windows
https://chocolatey.org/ https://chocolatey.org/
https://ninite.com/ https://ninite.com/
http://allmyapps.com/ http://allmyapps.com/
Ninite is clean and great for managing deployment on multiple machines, although it offers a limited number of curated apps (but they tend to be very common).
AllMyApps has tons of apps and the most user-friendly. I could give that to my mum. Only had some minor issues sometimes when it fails to recognise versions to update. It will even recognise and update apps that were not installed through its manager.
Chocolatey has lots of packages and you can create your setup to make it easy to deploy across machines. It's getting more secure and the authors are putting a review process in place to guarantee quality.
I've used all three and they all offer something useful. All allow you to manage your own deployment across machines.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoA nice list. How long they're all around? I still can't shake the feeling that it's only a matter of time before Moloch gets to them and they'll start serving crapware like any others. I'd love to be wrong on that.
- seanp2k2 12y agoI know ninite has been around for at least a few years. I've used it and it was an excellent UX. One installer, go through the wizard, then sit and watch it install a dozen useful things for you without having to hunt down all their installers and carefully click through, unchecking, canceling, backing through, and skipping around the horrible installers most of them have.
- celticninja 12y agoninite is at least 4 years old if not older and it has always stayed the same AFAIK.
- Vespasian 12y agoNinite is a really greate tool I've used it countless times while having a student job at our universities user support from 2010-2013. I really hope their business model (selling an update tool to private users and a side-wide deploy tool to businesses) works out until there is a usable windows store / package manager around. Each time I have to help someone setup a new windows laptop I get reminded why I'm using Linux as my main OS ;)
- jarcane 12y agoNinite is quite good; I've been using it for years. At one of my old jobs (a local PC repair shop), we were even in the process of switching our custom install script to a Ninite package. Chocolatey used to mostly be OSS stuff, but it looks like they've expanded with some nerd-favorite proprietary stuff now too. The list is also moderated, so that's a good sign.
- swies 12y agoNinite Co-Founder here. Our pro-version SAAS business model works great. Plus we started Ninite because junkware enraged us so much. It's just punching down at non-technical users. I'd kill the company before doing that. Anyway, we'll be around and junkware free until the world moves to platforms where everything's signed and sandboxed.
- asyncwords 12y agoI can't speak for the other two, but I believe Chocolatey is being integrated (or vice versa) with OneGet, the built-in package manager for Windows 10. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/chocolatey/a8WdEoF-M58 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/chocolatey/a8WdEoF-M...
- locusm 12y agoAdd http://scoop.sh/ http://scoop.sh/ to that list.
- king_jester 12y agoAs a scoop user it should be noted that scoop is much more oriented towards developers. Scoop runs in the Powershell environment and tends to mostly offer posix tools or SDKs as available packages, although git repositories can be added to scoop to provide more packages (there aren't that many of these right now).
- towelguy 12y agoScoop looks really awesome. Will definitively keep an eye on it.
- RayDonnelly 12y agoThere's also MSYS2, we are on SourceForge, but we'll never bundle or allow bundling crapware with our installer (and we release .tar.xz files for people who don't like installers). https://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2/
- JohnTHaller 12y agoWe have much the same functionality at http://PortableApps.com/ http://PortableApps.com/ You get an app store, an automatic app updater, an app manager, and hundreds of freeware and open source apps. All free of malware and bundleware. As a bonus, all the apps run from a single directory each, making it easy as pie to uninstall and remove all the apps settings at the same time (as opposed to bits left behind in AppData, Local AppData, the Registry, your Profile directory, etc). And they're portable, so you can run them from a cloud drive (DropBox, Google Drive, etc) that's backed up and synced between machines or from a USB drive.
- swies 12y agoPortableApps is great!
- johansch 12y agoI love the functionality of portableapps.com! The web design does need some work though... :/ It's really way too visually cluttered. Somehow my brain has been trained to think "be careful" when I see clutter like this on a web page.
- JohnTHaller 12y agoIt's cluttered and dated, sadly. We have a new design about ready as part of our Drupal 8 upgrade but had some issues upgrading to it. I'll be making another attempt soon.
- jayess 12y agoWow, what a great site. Thanks for this link!
- codereflection 12y agoThis is great, especially considering the main download for an app like FileZilla from Sourceforge contains extras in the installer.
- drzaiusapelord 12y agoI'll add filehippo.com to that list.