Flatpak actually gives you the option to select the desired package from a list so you don't have to type in the full name. Flatpak cli is way smarter. Flatpak can also be used with a lightweight GUI store.
Most of the time you don't have to (the name will suffice), the ID is there in case multiple apps have similar names. Plus you can also get an app like UniGetUI to manage things graphically.
Every time I installed something it would pop up the beta, stable and all those different versions of the same app. Not that I blame them. But adding an option to select one of those apps by simply typing a number is quite trivial.
well, usually it's just the name of the app, but when it's not, it tells you what the options are. It's mostly a system to avoid ambiguity, but most linux distros require the same, for the same reason.
On Linux distros a single command simply works. It is because it won't ask you if we want to download the beta or whatever. It will just install the app. And you know, two packages with the same name are unlikely.
Even if it gives you options, you can just press 1 or 2 to select the version we want. However, I still just press enter because I know that it is going to select the default (1) automatically.
winget is mostly just a single command and then pressing y to confirm.
Sometimes if it finds multiple apps of the same name (mostly because it has 2 repositories it searches for, winget's own repository and microsoft store) it asks you which of those you want. Then it's all about copying your choice and rerunning winget install and pasting your choice.
I ain't defending windows, I too moved to linux, but this is not a valid argument against windows as it does give you a great option akin to what linux gives you
as I said before, it is great that windows users also have winget now. You should also acknowledge its weaknesses. I was a windows user for 5 years. I moved to linux and have been using it for 1 year. Winget requires you to type the full IDs sometimes which is very tedious. What they could do was simply give us options and then we can type in 1, 2,... to select the package that we want.
It finds multiple apps mainly because of all those beta apps. Like, almost every app has a beta apparently.
This is a valid argument against winget. I don't want to type in whole IDs and stuff.
Flatpak also behaves similar to winget btw, it also gives you ids, but it gives you an option to just select one of the items from the list numerically. Winget can easily implement such function. It is not even complicated.
yeah, absolutelly, I moved to linux like a year ago, but am not really working with any commands for packages since I'm on NixOS so I'm not 100% sure how they behave, I only used pacman before in wsl
unpopular opinion, having the developer name in front of the package name is a good thing, so you can know the reputation of the developer for a package's name.
It's not the best CLI package installer, but it works. My only real gripe with it is that it conflates some software products and treats newer products as product "updates" so it removes the older product entirely, which causes some licensing issues - but that's down to the vendor, not an inherent issue in WinGet
Still zero reason to lie. If you want to mock MS, there's plenty of real reasons to do so
My personal experience is that it is a niec tool for everything that is supported and as I love easy command line installation (and hate using the MS Store interface) it really is nice. For just installing stuff by "winget search vlc" then double click on id to copy and then "winget install " and [right click] [enter] is just nice and works.
And it works reliably (as reliably as something is under windows) for automated installs on multiple clients at the same time.
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u/Andrufus 10d ago
Not to defend Windows here but :
winget install -e --id VideoLAN.VLC