Why the fuck does Windows still not have a fcking decent package manager?

I hear you "but but but, there is Chocolatey, it's great, try it!". Well yeah if you only want binaries.

But I do need to, you know, develop and compile things, and without includes, code, and a reliable way to produce working binaries from that, it's useless.

Guess who needs to download dependencies one by one, compile them one by one?

Don't get me started on broken MinGW, or the "recommended" way of doing a bat script to have proper includes (what the hell, that's the entire purpose of env variables), or the fact that there is NO convention on where to install things.

The original premise was to make every installer completely self contained, and make the dependencies a part of Windows itself, reducing the number of disks required for a given installation. It worked really well for a while, until cross platform development became a thing. Then more people started creating their own dependencies, at the same time as not including them in their installation packages. Standardised dependencies went out of the window, because cross-platform development made it difficult for small developers to obtain the appropriate licenses for those same third party dependencies, and now we have the mess that is linux-on-windows-on-mac-on-mobile.

Trying to fix that problem is somewhat difficult, a package manager won't solve all of our problems either. Customised dependencies see to that, and that's been a thing for far too long now to make any real difference.