WingetUI – A better UI for package managers | Hacker News Reader

WingetUI – A better UI for package managers

marticliment.com

60 pointst0bia_s27 comments

Even the website feels similar to Windows, it lags when I scroll.

Works fine on my 12-core Xeon with 96GB RAM. </s>

This has to be the least usable/performant site I've ever seen.... and it looks like it's from 1995. I'm honestly terrified to inspect the markup/implementation.

Based entirely on this alone, I wouldn't touch this thing with a ten foot pole.

UPDATE: Holy shit, I inspected the page. This madman is using calc functions inline on every single element to handle scrolling. Because we can't trust the browser to vertically scroll through this basic web 1.0 layout. And that's the very LEAST of what's going on in there. This has to be an April Fool's joke, right? Some kind of elaborate Andy Kaufman-esque prank?

There's nothing on this site using calc as part of scrolling the content. It looks like the background image is fixed in place with some JS, which is probably the source of the performance issues.

The questionable stuff is definitely that everything is a table and that the links on the bottom of the page are divs with onclick handlers... and that selection is turned off?

Utterly untrue.

https://www.marticliment.com/#start

Inspect: https://imgur.com/a/ljJl0nr

This has nothing to do with scrolling. They're fixed CSS rules. They remind me of the tricks we used to have to use for vertically centering things.

It seems like these rules are from the site's page load animation. You can see it if you refresh the page part way down. It's not a great way to achieve that effect.

I wouldn't call a 4 to 6 rows of buttons before you get content a 'better UI'... It seems cluttered at best. Even the not-exactly-amazing Mac AppStore has a small partition for navigation and a large partition for content and that's it.

I am using it and it is great so far.

One of the things I wish was improved was the UI for viewing the details of a package. Something better than right cliking and opening an unmovable modal popup. Maybe a vertical side panel that opens up on click and can be closed like in KDE Discover or like the preview panel in File Explorer on Windows. Selecting a different package would refresh the panel.

It would also be nice to be able to customize the columns in the gridview of packages and filter on them. I would like to be able to filter by source (show only Choco for example) or by licence (show only GPL packages for example) or sort by date last updated.

This app looks promising. Seeing as you're using it, how's the update process? Does it auto update apps, or can you at least click one notification to upgrade everything?

Because it's way too easy to install apps with winget or scoop, etc, but never update them.

It can be configured to notify(default), check manually or update automatically. I prefer the default. I only used it with winget, MS Store and Chocolately.

In my experience however, it had some issues (I believe they are actually due to winget) with some packages like Postgresql.

Overall I am happy with it and I prefer getting gui notifications for updates instead of manually running winget.

What a weird site and product. Why is text selection broken on what should be such a simple page? Why does the cookie banner say "we partner with Google", that's a weird way of describing using GA. Why would a developer link to their Softpedia page when they have their own download, mirrors like that seem to have been unnecessary for a decade or more. The copy is all just a bit weird, way too much "personality", and not in a charming or endearing way.

As for the actual product, it's not really a combination of features that I could see wanting as a developer. For installing system software... perhaps... but I don't tend to get that from PyPI or NPM, and in those cases I'd need to know it's not going to mess up the development environments for those ecosystems, and there's nothing of that mentioned on the page.

This strikes me as a labour of love from an individual that has received or taken in little to no feedback throughout the process – another piece of software that comes to mind for being in a similar position is Calibre, although in that case it seems to be strong resistance to feedback rather than lack of it.

This sort of development process can produce great technical achievements, but in my experience, rarely results in good products.

> Why does the cookie banner say "we partner with Google", that's a weird way of describing using GA.

That seems to be a common way to describe such usage to make it sound more positive. The truth of "we are exposing your data to Google to gain a bunch of mostly useless statistics while helping them to surveil all your online activity" doesn't sound so good.

"This site uses Google Analytics to inform service improvements" is quite positive. It's the "partner" bit that I thought was particularly strange. I don't partner with my local coffee shop each morning.

It comes across as bigging-up what's actually happening so far beyond reality that it's somewhat comical.

I looked at the website and product and cannot relate to this post at all. Seems like a run of the mill landing page for an app, and the app looks pretty decent. I find it hard to complain about any of it beyond how text selection is broken, which is bad.

I went back to read more to see if I had missed the mark, and jesus it gets worse and worse.

The page for WingetUI isn't too bad in terms of actual info, but it's a mess in terms of the language. It mixes different voices, contains way too much detail in some sentences just making everything harder to parse, and has strong opinions that just read weirdly, like having a dark theme "to prevent your from burning your eyes. [sunglasses-emoji]".

But navigating on to other pages on the site, things get worse. There are things that are jokes that are highlighted as such, and then there are things that should be jokes given the context, but appear to be dead serious. If the site was satire, pick a type of satire! There's a "project" that is literally Google in an iframe. Typos galore.

I don't get it. I guess the author is just a bit over-confident and lacking in feedback loops.

Okay, yeah, that's bad.

The links at the bottom are implemented with divs with onclick events instead of actual links, for some reason.

The author's seeming eccentricity does come through in the copy, but to me that made it seem less corporate / more old-school, rather than putting me off (though also preparing me for potentially some similarly eccentric design-choices in the actual product if I ever used it - no Windows installs these days though so I'll have to keep it in mind for the future).

On the other hand, I had a look at the sourcecode after you commented on text selection and it is... bizarre. The author has gone to absolutely enormous effort to prevent text selection - even if you disable all the (multiple layers of) CSS protections there's further JS events preventing you from seeing selected text (it still gets selected & you can copy but you have no way of knowing where you selection begins or ends).

Given everything is on Github under GPL, I can only think that this must've been done as a "let's see if I can" type of personal code experiment on their personal website, rather than any deliberate effort to obscure anything. Which is cool in a way I guess...

But Calibre is a fantastic piece of software whos innovation would be smothered by a proactive feedback process

Couldn't get it to work on my first try so I uninstalled it. I configured it to only use chocolatey, which I already use, and it showed two identical entries for "Chocolatey" under installed packages, instead of listing the packages that were already installed through chocolatey. Going into the settings and ticking "use system chocolatey" resulted in only one of the aforementioned entries showing up, but nothing else. I guess I'll keep using the CLI.

I don't use it even when I rarely use Windows - but I think chocolatey has a first-party GUI, if that's all you wanted to configure anyway?

I got super excited about this, but...

there's no `choco install wingetui` or `scoop install wingetui` listed on the page...

that made me mad enough to not bother at all and come here to complain instead...

It is available on winget and scoop according to:

https://github.com/marticliment/WingetUI/#installation

Maybe soon on Chocolately too.

Site is completely unusable on iOS safari. It’s in a constant state of refresh so you can’t scroll.

Interestingly it works fine for me on iOS, but it's completely unusable on Windows. Super laggy on both Chrome and Firefox, although very slightly smoother with Chrome.

I think this tool is amazing. I am used to automatic updates on OSX for most applications and i am missing this on windows.

i hope that fly-out menu with 432 packages has filtering capabilities. otherwise that's a big UX nightmare right there.

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