Getting started with winget

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ISSUE 20.21 • 2023-05-22 WINDOWS By Simon Bisson If you’ve used Linux, you’ll be familiar with package managers such as Debian’s apt and Red Hat’s yum
[See the full post at: Getting started with winget]

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bbobccat, fisher75, windbg, lmacri, geekdom

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winget upgrade –all –silent 

I run this command about once a week on my desktop PC and it silently updates almost everything for me without extra hassle. It is not fool proof, some apps return incorrect version numbers or have none at all, and some others report having an update available but still can only update from the app itself, but for the vast majority of programs this just works.

Occasionally, when installing something with winget install foo it will return multiple sources, in that case it’s as easy as doing winget install foo -s msstore or winget install foo -s winget to make it work again.

winget install foo -h to remove any unnecessary prompts (silent install).

The real power of winget is in being able to batch script installers this way. When I set up a new PC last time I just fed it a .bat with a list of winget install commands and it was downloading almost everything I otherwise would have to manually hunt down for.

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“Drop into your command line, type a few keystrokes, and you’re automatically up to date.”

Or don’t use the command line, don’t type anything, and use a few mouse clicks instead.

In KDE Neon, when the “updates available” icon appears in the systray, I click that, and the list of updates appears on screen in a Discover window. I can click the button at the top, “Update all,” and it asks my password, then performs the update. I don’t even need the keyboard if I don’t want to use it (though it is possible to use keystrokes in the GUI in lieu of mouse movements and clicks too, if desired). Or I can uncheck the updates I don’t want right now, which changes the “Update all” button to “Update selected,” and press that when I am satisfied with the updates chosen.

Discover is KDE’s software management tool, meant to be easy to use for beginners, like the MS Store, I guess, but lacking the more powerful features. That is why for most purposes, I prefer Synaptic Package Manager, which will do all the same stuff Discover does (without the pretty descriptions of various programs; it’s all business) and a lot more. For a simple update where I just want it to install everything available (99% of the time, this is the case), Discover is the path of least resistance.

I think Synaptic is preinstalled with Mint. For other Ubuntu derivatives, it is in the repo, ready to be installed by a tool like Discover or the command line.

Every distro I have tried has some form of graphical package manager. In each of them, you can use the command line for updates, but by no means do you have to. I am comfortable with the command line, and many years ago I would have gone out of my way to use the command line rather than any of that GUI stuff, but now I use graphical tools whenever possible, even in Linux.

The reason I bring this up is that there are a lot of people who are intimidated by the command line, and much of what they hear about Linux supports the notion that you’re going to be using the command line a lot in Linux, for better or worse. Most of the time, you don’t have to.

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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WingetUI makes updating much easier, obviating the need to remember commands. It is point-and-click.

Mark

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windbg, rbailin, erbkaiser

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I’ll take a look at that!

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Thanks I did not know about this command. Will be using the update option very soon.

winget search -q “” gave me a list of over 4500 items of which I recognized about 20 and many of which have a Name or Id that seem to be a bit questionable…
but when searched for (prepend search term with ‘git ‘ to get better results) usually appeared to be valid. Some searches did not return useful information…

Ximalaya.XimalayaLive (not in English)
Tweaking4All.RenameMyTVSeries (in English, but I still have no clue why I have it)
ThaUnknown.Miru (Bittorrent streaming software for cats ????)
skymavis.mavishub (some type of game ??)

And there were too many to search for them all manually. Is there a cross reference that uses the output of this winget command to provide an overview of each results function? Is there a list of ‘bad’ ones ? What on my system installed / is using each one ? Should any be removed ? How ?

Thanks again for the article.

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Phil B wrote:

winget search -q “” gave me a list of over 4500 items of which I recognized about 20 and many of which have a Name or Id that seem to be a bit questionable…

If you did a winget search, you searched all available packages.

winget list will return only what you have installed (and is recognised).

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geekdom

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Interesting winget article. I wonder if you know about SUMO – Software Update Monitor
https://www.kcsoftwares.com/?download A Windows, not command line, app. Has some features that winget lacks, some features that winget has that it lacks.

Big advantage is that it seems much easier to use than winget due to Windows interface.

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No, another one to look at!

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In the write-up on GitHub there is place where it says PowerShell (not Windows PowerShell). Can you please tell me what PowerShell I need for this?

 

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PowerShell is built-in to Windows. There is only one.

cheers, Paul

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Paul T wrote:

PowerShell is built-in to Windows. There is only one.

cheers, Paul

It is important to note that PowerShell 7.x won’t completely replace PowerShell 5.x when you install it on your system. Instead. PowerShell 7.x is installed in a separate location, and both versions of PowerShell remain usable on your PC.

How to Update PowerShell on Windows 11

The correct answer is PowerShell 7, NOT Windows PowerShell (5.1).

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Alex5723

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I note that the WinGet results for winget search winget show 3 GUI helper apps:

• Drew Naylor’s guinget
• HandyOrg’s HandyWinGet
• Martí Climent’s UniGetUI

I haven’t tried any of them yet but UniGetUI appears at first glance to be the most polished-looking (and also handles other package managers, e.g. Chocolatey) so I might give that a spin.

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erbkaiser wrote:

winget upgrade –all –silent

I run this command about once a week on my desktop PC and it silently updates almost everything for me without extra hassle.

A note of caution here. I ran this command once and it broke many/most of my AutoHotkey scripts by upgrading from version 1.1 to 2.0… the internal changes in operation between the two AutoHotkey versions are substantial.

Hope this helps…

 

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I’ve been using UniGetUI (i.e. WingetUI) since Apr 2024 and it works great!

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