logoalt Hacker News

marcosdumayyesterday at 9:23 PM0 repliesview on HN

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.