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Windows 11 does notify the user when a program registers itself to run at startup.

How it took Windows 30 years to do this is beyond me

Does Linux? OSX? There's a hundred and one different ways to get Windows to run something at boot, even as an unpriviliged user. So it's not as simple as just monitoring HKCU\..\Run. With Linux at least it's somewhat more limited: Unpriviliged users typeically only have access to cron for running things at boot.

"Does Linux" is a pretty broad question. Most distros nowadays will require you to manually enable systemd services you install though.

I think this is more like adding lines to /etc/profile.d or .bashrc than adding a service. Linux has a pretty complicated flow if you want to know what runs on login or on startup.

If the application choses to do so. Installation used to require root and I don't see a way who root could prevented from be enabling a systemd service. Short of having a signed read-only rootfs which no common distro has.

Nowadays you don't even need root to install something that runs a every login: There is the user instance of systemd. Of course without root those services are limited in what they can do.

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