Package Management in Windows

One of my main envies of Linux in the past years have been Apt-Get – the solution for managing installs and updates of software packages. There have been a couple of different solutions available for Windows historically. The best known one is a third party solution called Chokolatey that you can install and use on Windows and which has a huge repository of software available. The issue I had with Chokolatey was that is was not built-in to Windows… It felt a bit off having to install software to be able to install software.

A couple of years ago Microsoft included OneGet in Microsoft Powershell and I tried is a couple of times but being a bit lazy as I am I always felt it was a bit over-complicated. I never got the hang of having to install an trust providors and repositories. Since I mainly do this once when I reinstall a computer I never really found it worth the time to learn how to do this.

Fast forward to May 2020 when Microsoft introduced Winget. It was first made available as an install from Windows Store or directly from Github and from around May 2021 it is included in Windows as a default with no extra install required.

Yesterday when I reinstalled my computer I thought I would give is a shot.

To find software you use winget search. You can for instance type “winget search microsoft.” (Note the . at the end) to see all Microsoft software in the repository.

When you see the list of Microsoft packages you see that a lot of the regular downloadable packages such as Powershell and OneDrive. You will also find Microsoft Office, Teams and Visual Studio. All of Microsoft’s redistributable packges for supporting .NET and C++ are also available if you have any pre-requirement packages. A lot of the software might require a license which you will have to provide… when you for instance install Office you log into it as usual to provide your license informaton.

To install software you use the command winget install. You could for instance use winget install PowerToys to install Microsoft PowerToys or winget install “Microsoft vscode-insiders” to install Visual Studio Code Insider version. Note that you can use any of the information in the search results to identify which package should be installed.

Winget also handles the update of packages. To upgrade a specific package you can use winget upgrade [package name] or just use winget upgrade to upgrade all packages.

I really like what I see so far… 🙂

That is all for today

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