Google continues to struggle with cybercriminals running malicious ads on its search platform to trick people into downloading booby-trapped copies of popular free software applications. The malicious ads, which appear above organic search results and often precede links to legitimate sources of the same software, can make searching for software on Google a dicey affair.
On Windows, use Winget and/or Chocolatey to download your software when possible. There’s an unofficial site at https://winget.run/ that lets you browse all available Winget packages.
Microsoft store is good too, but not everything is listed there.
WingetUI supports them all: https://github.com/marticliment/WingetUI
Btw, winget: https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/
Yeah.
rant
What’s ironic, is that so many years later (what’s it been, 10 already?), Chocolatey’s “inferior approach”, even competing against now “Microsoft’s own” Winget, ends up with more failed updates on the Winget team than the Choco team. Which just goes to show what everyone has been saying from the beginning: that the core problem is, and has always been, on the installer side, not so much on the package manager side.
At least Vista has solved the “DLL hell” problem, maybe in another 10 years some future Windows will have an installer experience similar to Linux from 10 years ago. Powertoys somewhat recently introduced a “what’s using this file” tool… maybe that’s a step in the right direction towards noticing the need for a CoW approach to open files, or is that just wishful thinking? 🙄