Well, the rest of the world (outside of MacOS and Windows) settled on repositories and package managers, with hash verification, versioning, updating/installing/uninstalling with composable commands (that can also be used via GUIs), etc.

Use Fedora for half a year and tell me what you prefer.

Steam exists, and provides features desired by both users and developers.

I'm not sure getting software directly from developers is less likely to break than getting it through a store. The store may do QA to ensure that broken apps cannot be uploaded, developers may vanish and hence absent someone else being able to maintain it the app will eventually break, and how are security issues handled?

When buying software I mostly trust Apple over a random software developer.

>No middle man

There usually is, very few software companies handle card transactions themselves. They usually farm it out to someone like Digital River (who aren't very trustworthy).

I always thought Microsoft had seen how much money Google and Apple were making with their app stores and decided they wanted some of that pie...

> Seriously who needs a Store App on a desktop OS?

I like the idea. A single place to search for common apps, that also keep them updated. I don't want to download the .exe again and again with ever update. Just do that in the background please.

Though I mostly use WinGet, but it's sadly not as user friendly as apt.

Who needs it? Microsoft. They want to have something like iOS App Store and Android Play Store, there's a lot of money there