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.
Ninite is awesome
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.