Microsoft surprised Windows users with a new package manager yesterday. It’s a command line tool that allows developers, power users, and really any Windows user to install their favorite apps from a simple command. If you’ve ever had to wipe a Windows machine clean or set up a new device, you’ll know the pain of having to reinstall apps, find download links, and get a PC ready again.
[…]Microsoft creating its own Windows Package Manager (winget) is significant, and the command line tool is already more useful than the Windows Store. You can navigate to a command prompt, type “winget install Steam,” and the latest version of Valve’s Steam app will be installed on your system. Steam doesn’t even exist in the Windows Store right now; there are many apps already available on winget like Zoom, WinRAR, and Logitech Harmony Remote that are also missing from the Store.
Developers can choose to distribute their applications this way, and it seems Microsoft is managing a list of popular third party applications by itself. This is a great addition to Windows.
I should confess, I really much like the “development platforms” team at Microsoft (or whatever they are called).
They initially started the push for Open Source (under Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie), and had the first “official” package manager as NuGet. That was only for .Net dependencies, but that expanded to Chocolatey: https://chocolatey.org/ for all packages.
This is probably the next logical step.
Where were these guys during the early 2000s (the ‘cancer’ days)?
Wow, hell keeps freezing over at Redmond on a weekly basis. WIN-GET would have been more fitting maybe? Win-get install Ubuntu. Fun times. Who would have thought.
Well.. this is probably based on NuGet, like Chocolatey is, and so I guess it is pretty easy to make happen. Microsoft have had a secret package manager for years, it was just mainly used for .Net packages. It’s not hell freezing over, it’s just a natural progression of the tool for developers hitting mainstream Windows 10.
For what I can understand. They have basically ripped off the Linux idea of a packet manager? Like… The way stuff are done? Then thrown a bit of Android mentality into it. Well… Like we say. The way Linux works, are so much better than the way Windows work. And this is one great example of it.
No, just no, some parts of Linux works better than Windows, this one is, but not everything. Far from it.
Ripped off the idea of a package manager from Linux?
First, Linux didn’t invent the package manager, and second, Microsoft has had a package manager for 20 years – Microsoft Installer, or MSI.
This is obviously something different from MSI, but come on…
MSI isn’t a package manager, but an installation manager, that is about it. It has no built in update mechanism, nor does it handle any dependencies.
leech,
Yeah, I agree that MSI is microsoft’s answer to executable installers and zip files, but not really on the same footing as your typical package manager.
I’m not really using windows much these days, but I’m curious to try out winget.
Agreed but MS has shipped Pkgmgr.exe since Vista. It was just for installing/uninstalling OS packages from MS, but I would argue technically qualifies.
And I wouldn’t say MS “ripped off” anything, any more than Debian, “ripped off” Red Hat, or Red Hat did Slackware (though slackware lacked dependency management). Good ideas are worth doing, it doesn’t imply ill intent
jockm,
Yeah, nobody develops things in a vacuum. It’s usually wrong to give all the credit to any single company or individual because most often progress is actually a collaborative effort. I use “collaborative” loosely because often the collaborators are in fact competitors, haha, but they nevertheless build on each others ideas, which is a good thing when they are good ideas.
What does msiexec.exe do? It installs MSI packages (and in the MSI docs they are often referred to as packages).
What does YUM do? It installs RPM packages.
Calling one an installation manager and the other a package manger seems like a distinction without a difference.
MSI does have update mechanisms, and though it does not handle dependencies, it does do install-on-demand, where a package can advertise itself as available but not be installed, and if software tries to use the feature the package advertises, it will be auto-installed.
Drumhellar,
While there’s some overlap, the distinction is really about the areas where they do not overlap and the linux package managers are actually a superset of what MSI can do.
Not that there’s anything wrong with MSI, it’s just not at the same level. Anyways, now it’s irrelevant because winget should provide the same functionality that linux (and chocolatey) users have.
It is not a distinction without a difference.
On Linux distributions that use YUM, the “installation manager” is RPM ( hence the .rpm packages ). The “package manager” is YUM.
One Windows, msiexec.exe is plays the same role as RPM. That leaves room for an actual package manager which is what Microsoft is trying to do now I guess.
Wonder what this means for Chocolatey. The repo is filling up pretty quickly. Choco install winget.
There are still unique things that Chocolatey does, like using custom AutoHotkey scripts to click through GUI installers.
A great addition for windows.. I don’t know.. not without the remove function that completely removes an application and I mean completely remove it, leaving no mess of all kinds of files, registry entries, etc. behind.
FWIW, I like the Win-get installer. Makes it easy for sysadmins than cobbling together commands within installshield, etc.
To be honest, the bar set by Windows Store was really low.
– It’s missing some popular applications that people use: IrfanView, WinRAR, Notepad++. In fact the only thing I have installed from the Store is Windows Terminal. It doesn’t even have their own tools like PowerShell Core, AutoRuns, Process Explorer.
– The UX is counterintuitive. If you click the “Search” button, you expect the search box to be focused and empty, right? Wrong. It’s not focused and it’s populated with whatever you searched previously in the same session.
– It’s full of questionable stuff like something called “WinRAR ZIP” that is made to lure grandmas and uncles everywhere into giving out 10 bucks thinking they’re buying WinRAR.
Windows 10 is becoming a great option for me if were done back in 2000. Back then I was a college student working on my computer science degree. To do homework I needed some tools, those tools were not on Windows XP, or if they were they were too expensive for a college student. So I opted to run (what was back then) Red Hat, then moved to Mandrake as it was based on Red Hat but was a bit more user friendly. These tools were GCC, Gzip, SSH, a text editor that can color code your code, etc. Now a lot of these are bundled with Windows 10 or you can easily get them added on from Microsoft. But I am way too far the Ubuntu highway for me to really not use Linux as my main OS. Secondary OS on a spare machine sure why not.
motang,
I can see how windows 10’s inclusion of linux tools would be helpful, and I think redhat is a very good OS for a computer science students, but I’m not sure why you found it difficult to get (free) tools for windows back in 2000. Of course it’s too late now, but I think visual studio was available for free to students back then. And I personally used cygwin and mingw ports of gnu on windows. With cygwin, it would go through great lengths to implement unix/posix behavior and libraries on windows (forking, network sockets, file io, polling, etc) to make it easy to port software. I actually preferred to use mingw, which emphasized using native windows libraries and calls directly. I did custom software development with those tools and even wrote windows kernel drivers.
If you’re wondering why I moved to linux, I made a decision to leave the microsoft camp after vista when they started to lock down the kernel and not allow owners to install their own drivers on their own machines. MS executives were openly being hostile to FOSS back then and it made the decision to jump ship and go to linux much easier than it would have been otherwise. Through microsoft’s shortsightedness they lost a lot of developer mindshare to linux. Microsoft now realizes their poor judgement and has been throwing out more carrots to draw us back in. This is probably convincing some devs to go back, but I’ve changed personally, I put a lot of value on my freedoms and I don’t trust microsoft to protect them.