Windows Package Manager

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23 points·Koshkin··6 comments

I have used it for 3-4 years.

It has occasionally broken and been a complete fucking pain to fix. However, when it works, it's extremely nice. I definitely prefer the ui over any other package manager on any other OS that I've tried (apt, yum, zypper, pacman, brew).

I've found chocolatey more reliable but less complete and less polished. Haven't tried scoop.

It has every piece of software I want. I can't remember having to download something manually. Graphics card bollocks maybe, but tbf it never occurred to me to look for that in winget.

Most of the software is delivered through msi and will sometimes prompt for admin creds in the usual gui dialogue, but that hasn't troubled me yet. I do have a build script for Windows boxes but it's basically just a list of winget packages and a font fetcher. Windows machines are pets to me.

Only took them this long to come to some common sense. How long before they rename and back again this like they did with Intune.

I think what you mean is that it has only taken you this long to find out that windows has package managers.

Winget is 3 years old. It rips off AppGet, which was quite a bit older. Chocolatey is a decade old. Scoop is about 4.

But a package manager on windows is more a convenience than a necessity, because it has SxS to resolve dependency hell. AFAIK, no other OS has that feature, which is why package maintenance is such a task for Linux distros and builders of old source code.

Do any of those work on windows 7?

Chocolatey does. Maybe AppGet, but that's been retired, so ymmv

This is an first step.

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