Don’t have a full guide, but winget is your friend for quickly setting up Windows and has come installed by default for a while now. Lets you install most popular software through the command line, which is much nicer than wandering around the internet downloading installers.
That's great that microsoft calls it that, but that doesn't really matter.
Winget is just as much a package manager, as the "add or uninstall apps" tab in windows settings is.
It's just a interface. But the actual act of installing is done by different program.
I loved my Linux setups so much I automated them with some Ansible and a bunch of scripts and config files in a git repo to set up my user profile too.
I can't seem to get two Windows installs to be functionally identical the same way. I also can't believe winget is a relatively new invention.
You can turn off most of the annoying stuff, for a time. I'm convinced that sometimes settings just change on their own.
Wow, that's great, haven't seen that before! Granted, it was some time ago I did a setup from scratch.
Seems that installer is like 90% on the way to be useful as a general installer. At a glance, seems to missing things like networking setup (as most people use WiFi these days, it seems), but at least it takes care of most things you need for a install.
If you're on Windows, it's a great site. I just had to provision a new laptop, and it saved me a ton of time, since I was able to install about a third of my checklist with a single download.
Ditto, I was building a Windows desktop and spent hours faffing around attempting to follow official Microsoft instructions even with another Windows computer available; in desperation tried Rufus Installer, worked on the first attempt. Then months later was building another desktop and went straight to Ventoy installed from Linux and just dropping a downloaded ISO on the USB stick -- worked immediately.
Boxstarter (http://boxstarter.org/) automates setting up windows machines even more. It utilises Chocolatey to install 3rd-party software and also can install windows updates and take care for reboots etc.
Once you've set up a box-script, you may run it on a freshly installed windows, go to lunch, and when you return everything's set up.
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