Chocolatey

It makes installing software a breeze. For setting up new systems, this tool is a godsend.

Chocolatey is a great platform, but only if you are a USER of chocolatey. The second that you decide you would like to benefit the community by creating and releasing chocolatey packages to the community feed yourself, it turns into a nightmare. Mostly this centers around the "package review" process (if it can be called such). To begin with, the standards as to what constitutes an "acceptable package" are very loosely defined, which creates delays when trying to release your package when it already can take up to a month for a reviewer to even look/re-look at your package again. One of the pages on chocolatey's web site states "Since it uses PowerShell, if you can dream it, you can do it with Chocolatey." This statement however, is very misleading, as it would imply that you can run powershell commands to perform additional installation processes in your chocolatey packages, which you can do IF you are hosting your own feed. However, when posting to the community chocolatey feed, you are pretty much restricted to using only the chocolatey commands, and your packages will remain unpublished unless you take part in their interrogation as to why you didn't use only chocolatey commands or assimilate, all done under the guise of moderating the package to ensure it is safe. Apparently, chocolatey's "moderation" to promote a great user experience comes at the cost of providing a horrible and time wasting experience for contributors who want to submit packages. EG. I submitted a package myself that had the below line of powershell: [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12; This line was put in there because powershell could not download the file successfully without its presence, as powershell uses TLS 1.0 and the site from which the package needed to be downloaded uses TLS 1.2. However, despite the fact that my package met all requirements and conformed to every other standard, its publication has been delayed by almost 2 MONTHS BECAUSE OF THAT ONE LINE!!!!! Personally, I will never write a chocolatey package for the community feed again, because they just love kicking developers in the balls. Ferventcoder, if you are reading this, I would very seriously recommend that you modify what you currently and laughably refer to as a moderation process so as to not alienate the developers who put their time and energy into writing packages for the community feed. Or at least update the advertising on the chocolatey web site as to not indicate that you are free to use powershell commands that are not contained within the chocolatey module, to at least let people who write packages for chocolatey know about the kick to the balls that you will be delivering. You have worn me out and I will never submit one again because of the horrible experience dealing with your moderators and wasting my time reviewing their asinine input, modifying the packages to meet their asinine requests, and resubmitting. I am done, done, done, and if you are a potential who is thinking about starting, save yourself the nightmare and don't

I used to use the Homebrew package manager on macOS, and for me this is the best equivalent. Ninite has a very limited set of packages (possibly by design).

I'm still trying to get used to Windows, so I keep forgetting to launch Powershell with admin privileges to run the choco commands. So, a person like me would definitely install the GUI as part of it.

This is definitely worth it if you like to build packages for fresh builds of Windows machines.

They don't make installation easy. Click for Individual and there's no download link on initial page. Click on Generic and download, and the install file has a .nupkg suffix whatever that is.

It's buggy and fails to install-uninstall packages very often, Manual is confusing, Needs an elevated privileges to install packages.

A major disappointment comparing to Scoop.

Its an easy way to keep track of installed programs on windows.

Chocolatey could be the greatest package / software manager, there are many Pros and Cons of using it. It makes installing hundreds of programs a simple task... but there are many, maaaaaany packages, that either have errors or are outdated, abandoned or unmaintained by the community. Hope this tool and platform gets improved soon.