I have been using Debian Linux and similar flavours of Linux for many years as my main desktop, but supporting ordinary people, I have to use windows too. So i decided i needed a new windows machine to experiment with and I got one. It is a lovely Dell XPS which is much lighter than this Acer laptop, and today I set it up.

One of the best features of the Debian Linux environment is apt-get, apt or aptitude. You can search for and install software with ease, you can update the system when you want and it is reliable. With this in mind, I have discovered Chocolatey the package manager for windows and it is great.

So far i have installed Filezilla, Firefox, QuiteRss, Sublime Text and VS Code with this sort of command I will use to install some more

choco install chocolateygui
choco install libreoffice-fresh
choco install opera
choco install zeal

There is a chocolatey search engine where you can search for software. or you can search with

choco search wordpress

which provides a similar search to 'apt-cache search wordpress'

I tried to install 'googlechrome' but there was an error with the checksum, so that didn't work, but i have Edge, Firefox, Brave and Opera Browsers to use too, so thats no biggie!

I have used Windows a lot in the past and after installing Git, I managed to use Git Bash, which is more like a normal linux terminal.

It would be nice to have a WAMP type PHP and mysql server to play with too, i wonder what is installed with just composer, will it install dependencies?

choco install composer

There are also windows only tools, so I can also install this seo tool:

choco install screamingfrog

and also try this

choco install photogimp

This all makes it a breeze to install software in a predictable manner.

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