Having a package manager is one thing, having a good curated repo of packages is another. I doubt MS Will have the balls to say that all their "partners" (most of the AV vendors, Oracle, ...) whose entire business model is based on crapware or bait & switch will somehow be banned from the repo?<p>Currently it seems that both the apt and choclatey versions of Java actually come without crapware. I have a feeling that if this kind of install becomes the default then the crapware will be bundled there too.
<i>Sorry, penguin lovers — if you thought that 2015, in the heinous wake of Windows 8, would finally be the year of desktop Linux, you were sadly mistaken.</i><p><i>If you’ve ever ventured into the dark and mysterious land of Linutopia, where Ubutologists and Debianites reign, ...</i><p>Wow what a snarky article! I guess Extremetech does not like Linux at all...
> and who knows, that might just trigger some kind of revolution in Windows app management<p>Free trials of un-tar? Installing apps that require subscriptions to the cloud? Dev libraries that require enterprise support packages?<p>Good package management on Linux is owed largely to the tireless voices such as Stallman who understand the core issues here. Yes, tying together install scripts and maintaining repositories requires a lot of work, and good for Microsoft. But the reason It Just Works is because the software is free, from top to bottom, including the OS. And Mac will have the same problem here as Windows. For now, I'm guessing this is just a command-line interface to app stores.
the lead dev and architect for OneGet jumped on the reddit thread yesterday and answered a bunch of questions:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2khkpo/windows_10_to_have_a_package_manager/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2khkpo/windows_10_...</a><p>using the username : fearthecowboy (his twitter is the same, @fearthecowboy )<p>This was the top comment:
<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2khkpo/windows_10_to_have_a_package_manager/clleyir" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2khkpo/windows_10_...</a>
There will probably be a GUI for it, called an "App store".<p>Windows Vista had a command-line package manager, although it was rather lame. It was a kludge to feed canned answers to installer prompts.<p><a href="http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc748979%28v=ws.10%29.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc748979%28v=ws.1...</a>
The article says that it's the same format as Chocolatey (an existing Windows package management tool) but actually it's a fork of NuGet in Windows 10 and Chocolatey is also a compatible fork of NuGet. Microsoft already owns and maintains NuGet.
I'm coming to this massive comment party late, but I wanted to drop my thoughts about this and explain why I'm personally very excited by OneGet.<p>I'm a very experienced Windows Server Admin (15 years). I'm also a fairly experienced Linux Server Admin (7 years, on and off).<p>I'm currently an SCCM guru for a ~4000 user organisation.<p>I'm sure that if OneGet is supported by MS to the level which the developer explained in the reddit thread it'll be a boon to power users managing their own systems and to desktop support people.<p>But I can imagine that it'll be the SCCM teams who can leverage the most out of it.<p>The thought of being able to deploy and manage software across desktops and servers in a similar way to apt or yum makes me feel something close to utter joy.<p>I've had to build some very complex task sequences to install software on corporate machines. The worst example I can give is MS's own Dynamics CRM application. I was seriously proud of the batch files, registry inserts, dll hell avoidance, dependency solving, mother of all automated install processes to get Dynamics installed and hooked into Outlook in a magical way that the end user had no clue the complexity of.<p>It was only after slugging through developing all of the above that I found the incredible PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit [1], which people smarter than me had developed to basically handle everything I'd just slogged through.<p>From what I see OneGet has the potential of allowing us to easily push installs and updates via SCCM with out having to rely on 3rd party tools, batch files, msi rebuilding and general hackery.<p>Even if it doesn't gain wide support from software vendors, just enabling me to rip everything out of an msi and repackage it into a private OneGet repo sounds superior to having to rely on complex SCCM task sequences.<p>I'll be watching this closely.<p>[1] <a href="https://psappdeploytoolkit.codeplex.com/" rel="nofollow">https://psappdeploytoolkit.codeplex.com/</a>
Fantastic. It'd be great if it would integrate with the Store. I'm guessing that even if it supports dependency resolution, most packages will just be monolithic blobs like currently. That does have its advantages, so it'll be interesting to see if people switch to specifying dependencies instead of bundling them.
Will be interesting if this will be similar to linux with the possibility of community driven repositories alongside official repo's. Or if it's more of an admintool to do windows updates/windows store installs.<p>Edit: Apparently, it's also open source [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/OneGet/oneget" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/OneGet/oneget</a>
As simple as it seems, this single failing has been my primary reason for outright dismissing Windows as a reasonable contender for server usage, no matter what else Microsoft might do to make it attractive for a variety of server tasks. A system that cannot be updated easily without human intervention is not a system that deserves a place in any data center.
Chocolatey is great... although I wish it had a different "more professional"-sounding name.<p>When I was using it in anger a while ago I also found the quality of some of the packages to be a bit random, many of them just seemed to be random developer X's favourite aggregation of other packages. In which case I'm happy to see that they are adopting package moderation;<p><a href="http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/10/27/chocolatey-now-has-package-moderation.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/10/27/chocolatey...</a>
Someone at work told me Windows 10 is also going to have virtual desktops.
Haven't verified.<p>I did play with a release preview of 10. It was actually OK in a brief 5 minute survey. I won't ever use it for day to day stuff, (I'm a Linux user), but its nice to see them at least appearing to make an effort. I think most of us in the field are at some level negatively impacted when Microsoft engages in evil/stupid behavior, so it's nice when they come out with something good which they do from time to time.
But why "Install-Package", "Add-Package" and "Update-Package" - it's not like you can install, add or update anything else with this tool.
I am not sure why even in 2014 we have to pit Linux against Windows. We have surely grown out of that sort of debate.<p>Microsoft successfully achieved its objective of putting a computer in every home with the help of Windows. We should thank them for that. Linux on other hand has grown leaps and bounds. Android after all is a linux kernel fork. I think as technology lovers we can surely love both and look at them as technologies complimenting each other rather than competing.
Good step, now the rest of Windows... I mean, Program Files containing the binaries is not even in %PATH%. I assume improvements will be made here too, but I wonder.
I liked how the idea's champion dealt with Microsoft bureaucracy:<p>> So, back in August I started looking at what I was going to accomplish over the next year or so, and I thought it would be a good idea to try and see if I could get some of the CoApp package management ideas put into Windows itself (hey, it'd be kinda nice to be able to do apt-get style-stuff and have that built into the OS)<p>> I had proposed some of this at the beginning of the product cycle for Windows Blue (Server 2012 R2/Windows 8.1) but it was a little too late in the planning cycle, and I gave too-grand of a vision.<p>> I finally came to full understanding of some advice my pappy once told me: <i>"The secret to success is to find someone else to care what you care about, and make it their problem."</i> ... I looked at him like I understood what he meant, but he could tell that I was just paying lip service. He then said <i>"Try it this way: Set the building on fire, take someone else's stuff into the building with you, and then cry for help"</i><p><a href="http://coapp.org/news/2013-10-02-State-of-CoApp.html" rel="nofollow">http://coapp.org/news/2013-10-02-State-of-CoApp.html</a>
> While Windows and Mac users have to run graphical installers — you know, where you hit Next a few times and try to avoid installing bundled crapware — Linux users can just open up a command line and type sudo apt-get install vlc.<p>Right. As if VLC on windows comes with crapware.<p>As if apt-get [0] never asked cryptic messages [1].<p>[0] or yaourt or any other package manager<p>[1] and it's more about the package than the package manager
I believe the biggest problem for its success is that most companies don't want to give up the control a dedicated installer gives them (e.g. installing AskBar that comes with Java, as some comments pointed out).<p>In Linux, dedicated installers are the exception not the rule. I'm curious how the adoption on Windows will be, especially for commercial/non-free software which there is a lot on Windows.<p>I'm also curious how they will present the packages to the average user. Worst case, the user will have to look in three different places to uninstall software (namely System Control, the package manager, and in directories of software that isn't registered anywhere).
I love it. Bring on "sudo apt-get install."<p>Somehow, folks have been led to think that the command line is a scary place, just for geeks, but it's so easy to lead someone through a slightly complex manual installation by just giving them a few commands to copy and paste into the terminal.<p>And as a somewhat casual user myself, I even find it easier to follow a command line installation than to wade through several pages of "open this window, click on this, click on that," especially when the instructions and the actual installer don't exactly agree due to revision divergence.
There has been an (albeit poor) package manager for some time: <a href="http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/cc748979(v=ws.10).aspx" rel="nofollow">http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/cc748979(v=ws.10)...</a><p>I've personally struggled with it to fix corrupt updated installed by windows updates, and while it doesn't meet the bar set by mainstream Linux distro package managers, it is a package manager nonetheless.
Plus, it seems like puppet is working on a plugin to make use of OneGet. It'll make work much more interesting in the future that I'm actually looking forwarding this happening.<p>Couldn't find much more on puppet on this topic than this presentation:
<a href="http://www.slideshare.net/ferventcoder" rel="nofollow">http://www.slideshare.net/ferventcoder</a>
I hope they change the options. I think this is way too long for a command:<p>* Install-Package -Name firefox<p>When in Linux I can just do this:<p>* apt-get install firefox<p>I would love to see this:<p>Package -install firefox
I think the article misses the point. It doesn't matter if the package manager is CLI or GUI-based, what matters is good UI and quality (+ price) of application packages.<p>Mobile stores (Google Play, Apple Store) are a good example of this... they host many apps & are easy to use. Who cares if you use keyboard, mouse or touch to get them.
I think there is a huge missed opportunity here. I mean, it's good that Microsoft is finally adding functionality that went mainstream in the late 90's. But why don't just skip the flawed approach most of the current Linux distributions use? In my opinion they should have been looking at a more declaritive approach, such as the Nix package manager uses.<p>I will agree though that this oversight is not as bad as TFSVC. Where they were building a centralized version control system when the whole world was switching to decentralized VCSs.
I'm not a Windows user so maybe I'm way off, but wouldn't adding Cortana go much farther in getting people to upgrade?<p>How's the Kinect support in Windows? Quite honestly, Microsoft is only competing against itself. How many XP uses are still out there? A couple hundred couple hundred million? Give them a reason to get excited.
> Find-Package<p>> Install-Package<p>Dashes and uppercase...what terrible names. Is the windows shell case sensitive (I seem to recall it is but it may have changed)? We've been designing command line interfaces for over half a century now, this is just lazy. Shells are not magically exempt from UI best practices just because they're not graphical.
If Windows 10 was built on top of Linux I'd get a lot more excited.<p>I have to use Windows for the myriad of engineering tools that are not available under any other OS, for example, SolidWorks, Altium Designer, various embedded toolsets, etc. And, while I've been using PC's (and Macs and Linux) since they came on the scene I hate, hate, hate the DOS or technically DOS-like underbelly of the beast.<p>I know it is a ridiculous idea. It would break everything, including their profitable corporate platforms.<p>Yes, there are ways to mitigate this but it'd be nice if all computing platforms got behind a common standard. Utopia. I know.
In terms of managing programs/packages, what is wrong with Add-Remove Programs/Programs and Features? I've always found these to be satisfactory. Or am missing the point here? In terms of automatically retrieving the correct dependencies, I can see this being pretty useful, even if most programs already automatically install the dependencies or at least let you know that you don't have them. Maybe I'll find myself in .Net framework or MS C++ distribution hell a little bit less. The same problem, with missing or incorrect shared libraries, seems to happen just as much when I am on a Free/Net/OpenBSD system. And the workflow for installing a Windows program is fundamentally different from the *Nix eco-system; as the former is mostly closed while the latter open, you have to be much more discrete when installing on Windows.<p>Maybe I am using Windows differently than a lot of other people even if I consider myself a "power" user. I've always felt much of Windows' power and usability came from it's GUI focused experience (forgetting the maddening changes that can occur between versions).<p>Post: after writing all that, I looked at Programs and Features (on windows 7 now) and I think the biggest advantage of something like this would be mapping out dependencies, even if I don't think I've ever deleted one by mistake. Still, it would be nice.