Why is winget supplying the portable version of VSCodium?

[mariobrostech]

Hi,

Out of curiosity, I was wondering why winget fetches the "user"/portable version of VSCodium as opposed to the full desktop installer. Could anyone clarify why this might be, given that most other applications available on winget are full installers?

For reference, here are the links to the latest portable and full installers for VSCodium. winget seems to be using the former.
Portable installer
Full installer

If this is the intended behavior, is there any reason why the desktop installer isn't available as an option?

Thanks in advance!

[ImJoakim]

Heya @mariobrostech, the manifest currently contains both the User installer and the Machine installer. You can choose which installer to install by doing the following:

winget install vscodium --scope machine
winget install vscodium --scope user

It defaults to the user installer.

[ImJoakim]

I don't know the reasoning off the top of my head. I do know that you are able to choose the default behavior via settings. You can read more about that here.

[mariobrostech]

Thanks for the tips! I'm going to leave this discussion open so someone can comment if they know more about this behavior in particular.

[OfficialEsco]

as this is a VSCode fork AFAIK the preferred installation type is User, unless VSCodium prefer the Machine Wide installation.

WinGet probably defaults to User so the installation is as silent as possible, Microsoft have also started going in the User installation direction for Private use and Machine Wide for Company's.

Quite a lot of installers have also started to use/recommend user installation (Appx, MSIX, NSIS/Nullsoft and the latest InstallShield(?) installer)

Most users will not care or notice which is why they default to User, if you've installed the software Machine Wide before winget upgrade will respect that choice.

You'll probably get a more concrete answer from @denelon

[denelon]

@mariobrostech, @OfficialEsco is correct. We're defaulting to user as the standard mode. As @ImJoakim stated, we support both command line and settings to specify any preferences / requirements one has. Generally speaking, the user is default so as not to require UAC or elevation where possible.

[mariobrostech]

Ok, sounds good, thanks for the help! I'm closing this now since the solution has already been posted for those who want to change the installation scope.