Some Windows users do not like Chocolatey

tl;dr: some experienced Win users stay clear of Haskell because of Chocolatey.

Exposition

Today I asked a friend of mine who runs Win10 to compile a small Haskell program for me. I asked out of curiosity how the install process went — that is, installing Haskell —, if it was annoying, etc. Answer:

It was only not annoying because I took an image of my laptop first so I can cleanly remove it, because the problem is Chocolatey is installing a lot of stuff without making it clear what you will end up with.

I enquired more and:

I think you would have to go and read the scripts to be sure what you would end up with. I would prefer to have installed msys2 myself and then got the haskell parts separately.

My specific issue would be: what Chocolatey did did not seem too complicated. I would have done it myself if there were download links alongside the Chocolatey version. My issues with Chocolatey is that they random command-line switches behind a paywall/ransom. The specific example was trying to install the Visual Studio compiler in a container and wanted to use some different flags to keep the size/bandwidth usage down, I passed the options as documented and then it refuses and says this feature is pay only.

Comment

• It is not the first time I have heard some venting about Chocolatey;
• this user does not «lack administrative privileges and those unfamiliar with PowerShell», so I feel this is not a duplicate of #18104;
• I understand there is little or no manpower behind Windows build;
• this creates a vicious circle where some experienced Windows users shy away from trying Haskell ⟶ smaller pool of contributors for Windows builds ⟶ suboptimal onboarding experience ⟶ …;
• I sadly have no idea how to break the circle, having used Linux exclusively for the last 15 years.