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Seems like the takeover of free software continues apace, in the land of Redmond, where the Blue Screens lie.
From ZDNet,
The Windows Package Manager service and the winget.exe command-line tool are now available in public preview for everyone to test. Winget comes with the preview version of Windows App Installer for sideloading apps on Windows 10.
While Windows 10 users can install apps from the Microsoft Store, the Windows Package Manager will help developers install tools that aren't necessarily available in the store, such as Win32 software products that haven't been converted to Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps in the store.
win-get? As the Operative said in "Serenity", "Bastards aren't even changing course!" Microsoft not even changing the name of the utility. At least with Stacker, they changed the name to DoubleSpace.
The tool can help users get their apps by typing 'winget install' followed by the program name into the command line or create a script that automatically installs all necessary tools.
The package manager is available to users in Microsoft's Windows Insider testing program after installing Microsoft's App Installer program.
Microsoft has aimed to create a repository of trusted applications, from which the package manager can install apps that have been vetted with its SmartScreen technology and cryptographically verified.
While the package manager does provide an alternative to the Microsoft Store, formerly the Windows Store, Microsoft says it changes nothing for the store.
What is this "store" they speak of?
The key difference between the Microsoft Store and Windows Package Manager is that the store is all about commerce while the package manager is not.
"The Windows Package Manager is a command-line interface, no marketing, no images, no commerce. Although we do plan on making those apps installable too," said Demitrius Nelon, a senior program manager at Microsoft.
Seems that they copied that from free software, specifically Debian, as well. "bash:~& sudo win-get remove --purge Windows --extreme-prejudice" Adm. Akbar says: "It's a trap!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2020, @01:15PM (1 child)
I do Linux system administration as part of my job, so I can Frankenstien almost any combination of software on most Linux distributions. But for most people who might want to use Linux, I think the path of least pain is an Ubuntu flavor or maybe Linux Mint, because then chances are good that anything you want is already in the default repositories.
OpenSuse Linux, Void Linux, PCLinuxOS, and dozens are other options are fine if you can do everything you want with the software in their default software repositories. I mean no disrespect to those distributions, their contributors, or their happy users. But if you want to use something that's available out of the box on Ubuntu but not on Void Linux or PCLinuxOS, chances are good it's going to be a real pain.
Side note - while universal installer systems like Snaps, Flatpak, and AppImage are interesting, I think the real future of that kind of system might be WebAssembly. It gives you the same universal installability as Snaps, Flatpak, or AppImage and also the same security sandboxing, plus cross-operating-system installability plus dynamic linking of dependencies plus cross-programming-language library sharing. That is, someone could write a library for manipulating movie files in Swift and compile it to WebAssembly and someone else could write Python code to use that library and compile it to WebAssembly. The people calling WebAssembly/WASM the future of computing may not be wrong.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday May 26 2020, @09:53PM
WebAssembly: Write Once, Run Everywhere for people too young to remember why Java didn't take over the world with the exact same pitch.