I've long through someone could do well to use Chocolatey as the source of truth for a ConfigMgr metadata stream. Chocolatey is the closest thing I know of but it's ConfigMgr integration isn't free/great. This guide will help you locate possible log files for different scenarios. There's some crowd-sourced community efforts ( CMPackager, RuckZuck, Chocolatey) out there that have been mentioned here but none of them have any kind of critical mass to support 100s of apps. Sometimes we will need you to provide log files for troubleshooting. To say nothing of the initial app install which in many cases require some amount of customization/configuration. Further complicating matters is that not every org is going to want apps packaged with the same options.

It's populating that stream with app data that is a tireless, never ending, grind that takes a high level of skill to do right. The cold-hard reality is that delivering a stream of 3rd party update metadata isn't that hard. Yea, there's no real 'free' alternative here.

Patchmypc catalog