Winget made me lose 40 minutes of my life.

Start rant.

This is my first experience with Windows in a long while, and my first experience with winget, the package manager.

I have to use a Windows machine to test libraries and applications for my $job, and I'm running it as a virtual machine on top of my arm64 macOS machine.

I tried to install GnuMake, from the gnuwin32 project. You can do that by running this command:

winget install -e --id GnuWin32.Make

And I did so. Winget returned me to a prompt, and I assumed the installation was successful.

I quickly typed "make" into my prompt window, and I was welcomed by:

'make' is not recognized as an internal or external
command, operable program or batch file.

So, my first thought was to reload the environment. I tried again and I got the same result.

I then typed: echo %PATH% to find out that winget didn't add anything to the PATH, and only after I explored my filesystem to add the entry to the PATH manually, I noticed that winget didn't make any changes to the filesystem.

It failed without any notice, in an interactive user shell.

Winget is an example of shit software.

Recap:

MICROSOFT'S OFFICIAL PACKAGE MANAGER, WHICH:

• Fails silently in an interactive shell.
• Doesn't do what you tell it to.

AN OPERATING SYSTEM WHERE:

• The standard is to have binaries scattered around the filesystem randomly.

I hate winget (and windows) from the bottom of my heart.

End rant.