As I've mentioned before, I'm a fan of apt-get. It's an extremely easy way to get tons of new applications installed on a new Linux installation. Plenty of similar options exist for Windows, but one stands out.

GetIt combines the power of three Windows implementations of the system - AppSnap, AppUpdater, and Win-Get. Once you've got all your engines installed, use Get-it's GUI to set them up (just click the buton) and you're ready to install.

More than four hundred apps are currently supported, including Avast, AVG, CDBurnerXP, Firefox, AutoHotKey, uTorrent, VLC, OpenOffice, and Handbrake.

Applications can be installed a number of ways. When GetIt checks your repositories for updates, it creates installer files in its Install folder. After that, you can:

• Browse to the folder and double-click an installer
• Use the GetIt Gui or command line
• Index the folder and launch installers from Find and Run Robot (or your favorite launcher)

Installs run without user input, and GetIt also supports checking for updates to your apps. I'd like to see the GUI support multiple selections and would prefer not having to "press any key to continue" following an install, but those are minor gripes. For the average user, category listings would be a helpful addition.

GetIt is a simple, powerful way to download and install tons of great software and keep it up to date on your Windows PC.

There are plenty of things to love about a modern desktop Linux distribution like Ubuntu 8.04. It's got nifty desktop effects, comes with an office suite, web browser, media player, and pretty much anything else you need for day to day computer user. And there's a huge list of applications you can install with the click of a mouse.

But there's one thing I absolutely hate. And that's the fact that while package managers like Synaptic and apt-get make it incredibly easy to install all sorts of applications, uninstalling is another matter.

I wanted to see if I could get some audio editing tools up and running on my Eee PC 1000H today. I could have just tried installing Jack and Ardour, but I decided to go all out and install Ubuntu Studio's audio packages. I opened a terminal, typed in "sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-audio," and after downloading 300MB of files and unpacking them to take up 600MB on my desktop I was all set. Dozens of utilities has been installed, most of which I didn't have any intention of using. After playing around a bit, I couldn't figure out how to playback audio in Ardour, the one app I really wanted to use. And Ardour crashed about 70% of the time I tried to launch it.

So I decided to uninstall using the same method. I opened a terminal, typed "sudo apt-get remove ubuntustudio-audio" and received a message saying I could free up 49.2KB. Only two packages would be uninstalled, and almost all of the audio applications I didn't need would stick around, eating up hard disk space.

Apt-get makes it incredibly easy to install software. It's not so easy to remove it. It looks like my best bet is to go through and remove the applications I don't need one by one. I'm amazed how often I run into this program.

If you don't tend to install a lot of programs that you later wind up uninstalling, Ubuntu's a great operating system. If you enjoy testing out new software, and value both your hard drive space and your free time, Ubuntu may not be for you.

I haven't played with Fedora, SUSE, or PCLinuxOS lately. Anyone know if any of them have a package manager that makes it easier to remove applications?

Update: Thanks to mcdope, I managed to find a solution. But it was so non-intuitive that I'm going to stand by my headline. Uninstalling applications needs to be much simpler in Linux.

Basically, apt-get autoclean, apt-get autoremove, and apt-get --purge remove did nothing for me. What helped was installing the debfoster package and then running it. This shows a list of all packages that were installed along with ubuntustudio-audio (or any other package). If you select "y," you can keep a package. Selecting "n" removes it -- but not the other packages that rely on it, as I figured out the hard way.

So I had to reinstall ubuntustudio-audio, run through the whole process again, and this time select "p" for purge." That finally removed most of the apps that had been installed as part of the package and cleaned up 519MB of disc space. Finally, I ran apt-get autoremove which seemed to cleanup a few more loose ends.

Thanks for all your suggestions!

Think installing applications in Linux is too complicated? If you don't like reading about cool new software only to find out you have to launch a terminal window or package manager to install it (as opposed to Windows applications which you can download and install from the web page where you read about them), Apturl helps simplify the process.

Apturl is a protocol that's included in Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04 by default. But if it's not installed for some reason, you'll have to open up a terminal window at least one more time and type "sudo apt-get install apturl" (without the quotes). From now on you can install any application you like from the Firefox web browser just by typing "apt:package_name" into the location bar. For example, if you want to install the AbiWord word processor, you'd type "apt:abiword" and a window will pop up asking if you'd like to install the application.

Apturl also lets users create links on web pages that will let visitors automatically download and install applications. Just create a hyperlink to "apt:abiword," or any other package, add the link to your page, and when you tell visitors about cool new Ubuntu software they might want to try out, they can install it without leaving your web site.

There's no risk of downloading malicious software, because Apturl will only install applications that are available in the repositories you've enabled for your computer. That means a team of Linux developers has looked over every single application that you could possibly download this way, unless you add an untrusted repository. So if you happen across a web site that tells you to add a repository with a name like "deb http://dangerous.software.com/risky main" before clicking on links to install applications, you might want to be careful. Otherwise, you should be safe.

[via Linux Hack3r and Digg]

Appupdater might just be the coolest Windows app ever. OK, that's probably an overstatement, but we've been looking for something like this for ages. Essentially, Appupdater is to Windows what apt-get is to Debian Linux. In other words, it's a command line utility that lets you automatically download, install, update, and remove applications.

Here's how it works. Once you've downloaded and installed Appupdater, you can either run it by clicking on a shortcut or by running the Appupdater command using a command line box (which you can pull up by typing "cmd" into the Run box in your start menu.

While there is a graphical interface, it's pretty ugly and the command line version is actually much easier to use. Here are a few commands to get you started:

• "appupdater --update" will grab a list of available packages (or programs) from a server.
• "appupdater --list" shows a list of installed packages on your system. Note, this is not a complete list of installed application, but rather a list of packages available in the repository which you have already installed.
• "appupdater --available" displays a full list of available packages.
• "appupdater --install PKG" will let you download and install a package. For example, "appupdater --install pidgin" downloads and installs the latest version of Pidgin.
• "appupdater --upgrade" will download and install updates for all supported applications that have available updates.
• "appupdater --remove PKG" uninstalls a specified package.

You can get a complete list of commands in the user manual.
AppUpdater does not by any means support every freeware application available for Windows. But it does have a pretty good list of apps. And you can also create your own custom repositories.

We've seen other attempts to create a Linux-style package management system for Windows. But Appupdater definitely seems to be the most useful of the bunch.

[via Lifehacker]

Win-get isn't the first attempt we've heard about to replicate the Debian Linux package management experience on Windows. But unlike Ed Ropple's proposal, Win-get already works. Sort of.

If you're not familiar with package management, here's how it works. You type "apt-get install <name of program>" into a terminal and your operating system will find that program online, download it, and install it. Newer versions of Linux have graphical interfaces that basically let you browse through a huge list of mostly free and open source software that you can download. No need to search the web for a good image editor. Just open your package manager and download GIMP.

Win-get aims to work pretty much like apt-get, but for free Windows software. We're not talking open source here, necessarily. Many of the programs in the win-get repository are free to download and install, but the source code may not be available. There's a huge list of software available for download.