alt Hacker NewsWindows, especially old versions, were beautifully pragmatic. Think about the things that would need to exist on an open-source OS to match this functionality. You'd need to:
1. Convince people to distribute programs via installers.
2. Provide some way that installers can tell the OS that they're an installer (and not invent 5 different ways to do this!)
3. Convince the creators of installers to actually use that function.
4. Convince library creators to maintain backward compatibility (big ask).
5. Convince people to not fork said libraries, creating ambiguous upgrade paths.
6. If there are multiple distros, convince them all to use the same backup/restore format for libraries (and not treat their own favorite libraries as "special")
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> 2. Provide some way that installers can tell the OS that they're an installer (and not invent 5 different ways to do this!)
It is still blows my mind what to tell the distro flavour and version I still need to rely on the shell globbing.
1-3 are covered by package managers in pretty much every Linux distro and BSD.
That's not exactly what Windows installers did.
They absolutely created 10 different ways to install software; they didn't really advertised they were an installer; the only backward compatible thing there are the MS libraries; there was no common backup/restore format.
Instead, the Unix people made a mechanism for random programs to use their own libraries and not touch the system one. In fact, Windows had one too, but most applications still decided they need to break the system.