WinGet is terrible. I want AppGet back.

It's a year later and we can now safely conclude that WinGet is terrible. It calls itself a package manager, but it doesn't really manage packages: it can only install them. With AppGet you could actually manage your software. If it got outdated, you could update it. If you no longer wanted it, you can uninstall it. WinGet doesn't do that. It just downloads software and installs it.

For months there's been experimental" support for the most important feature of a package manager: upgrades. It just doesn't work. Sure, it will download the updates. It'll even pretend to install them. And if you run it again, it will do it all over again for the same packages. It's pointless. It just pretends to upgrade software, just like it pretends to be a package manager.

One of the main reasons I use Linux is just how insanely superior installing and managing applications is on Linux compared to Windows and macOS. As a Linux Mint user, I'm part of the Debian ecosystem, meaning virtually every piece of Linux software comes packaged as a .deb (you'll have a similar experience with e.g. RPM or Arch-based distributions), managed from one central place. I never have to think about how to install, update, or remove an application.

Windows and macOS have various different methods of installing, updating, and removing applications, and many of these methods leave files all over the place. On both Windows and macOS, you have to deal with individual per-app update tools, application stores, downloading individual updates from the web, using tacked-on, always-breaking ports systems, and it's up to you to remember how, exactly, each application handles its installation, update, and removal procedures.

WinGet is just another mess to add to the giant pile of garbage that is managing applications on Windows.