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by Insanity·9y ago·view on hn ↗
I have not used PS that much so I am not sure how much can be accomplished with it.

One of the great things about a Linux system is that you can use the terminal to install and delete programs. Can you do that with PS without using something like Chocolatey?

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Not sure I understand the question. You can always just copy a program somewere, add it to path and so on with both PS and cmd (or script it, the equivalent of "make install").

You can also download and install Windows installer setups from a shell, and also uninstall them e.g by name (more elegantly in PS than in cmd). Because win apps are usually binary this is a more common way than the "make install" equivalent on Linux (Where I don't believe there exists a distro independent binary installer format?)

You can't install apps like "packages" without a package manager like choclatey, but that I assume is the same in Linux, you need to install a package manager like apt or yum if the distro didn't come with one.

Indeed, you have package manager interaction but I think that on most linux boxes that is standard? I could be wrong there though, it just goes for the ones that I have used.

Still pretty meat that you can uninstall a program from PS. Might need to give it a closer look, any suggestions on where to learn it from?

It's not all that standard on Linux under the covers either, because the package manager is a function of the distribution and its ecosystem and there are two main package ecosystems rpm (current package manager: yum) and deb (current package manager: apt) and a very long tail of other package systems and ecosystems. If you stick primarily to a single distribution you wind up mostly fine (until you need packages outside your ecosystem), if you need to interact with multiple ecosystems things get more complex.

The big difference between something like Chocalatey and rpm/deb Linux package ecosystems is more one of scale (how many packages exist in the ecosystem; how many players are expected/required to buy into the ecosystem).

An interesting twist to this is that PowerShell in Windows 10 'recently' added a meta-package manager "OneGet" that was designed to use a single set of commands to learn to work with a wide collection of package ecosystems (including, but not limited to, Chocolatey, NuGet, MSI installers, Docker packages, whatever other sort of provider someone wants to build).

There are several different ways, see e.g http://stackoverflow.com/questions/113542/how-can-i-uninstal...