[Isthatablackgsd]

Winget is great package manager. I am staying with Chocoately due to WinGet have less software in their catalogue. WinGet are missing software that I regularly use in my Windows that I am able to get it through Chocoately.

It missing some like mupdf, TeX Live, Tixati, Q-Dir, Emulators, UMLs, etc. Through it have MiKTeX but I was burned by miktex's package update procedure weirdness.

[WorldMaker]

The workflow to submit new packages seems easy enough, it's a simple PR process to a GitHub repo [0], if you want to try to help fix that.

The big thing is that winget requires "proper" MSI or MSIX-backed installers (MSIX, MSI, APPX, and most .exe installers) rather than scripts so given the list you've provided some of what you may need is to better help some of the upstream packages clean up their installers/fix bugs in their installers on Windows. (Package update weirdness sounds like a common class of installer bug, sadly.)

That installer focus is one of the things I like and trust about winget. For the most part it is really easy to verify that winget isn't automating much more than what you could do by hand: it is often grabbing the exact same installer you'd go to someone's website to grab, validating hashes for that installer, then running it (in silent mode). One of the reasons I gave up on Chocalatey years ago was too many "packages" were complex PowerShell scripts and I started feeling like I needed to audit every single one (and every version of it) before running it. Some of the "common" packages were full of opinionated scripts that were doing way too much, and some of the uncommon scripts would sometimes have malware in their scripts (and that may be a late change after years of good scripts, too); I reported it every time I saw it, but at some point you report too many and you lose trust in the whole ecosystem. At the moment trusting winget is still quite a bit easier, even after the burnout I had from choco.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs

[majkinetor]

That's also what is bad about winget - not having scripting language. AFAIK there were 0 incidents with choco scripts, they are mostly trivial to review (choco also has team of reviewers and no package can be published without being reviewed) and many tools simply can't be installed without PowerShell - the idea of "help some of the upstream packages clean up their installers" is irrational and unrealistic - some of those tools may be even done with the upgrades, which doesn't mean they shouldn't get a package.

Furthermore, many choco packages are embedded and contain the software, which means they can be cached (artifactory, nexus etc.) do not depend on vendor location and can work forever (like development dependencies). All of this makes winget vastly inferior to choco at this moment and suitable for hobby/home use, not serious things like maintaining CI/CD pipeline.

Choco package number and speed of update is on par with Arch.

The good thing about winget is it comes with Windows, which is probably the only one at this point.