> I have always wondered why Windows never had a unified installation, update, and uninstall framework like MacOS had from the start. It seems like an obvious omission that was never solved.
I was shocked when I switched to macOS. I couldn’t believe how much better the typical install experience was compared to Windows. Just drag the downloaded file into a folder. No need to run some bespoke install wizard. Even when applications did need to run something to install, it was almost always just the same (presumably system-provided) install flow.
The first time I encountered something this wonderfully simple was on the Acorn Archimedes (RiscOS): an "application" was a folder whose name started with an exclamation mark. It could customize its icon. If you had the luxury of a hard disk, you could simply drag-and-drop a copy of an application from its floppy disk on which it was distributed.