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Comment by phendrenad2 | Hacker News Reader

Windows, 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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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.

One of the biggest pitfalls in understanding the world is interpreting everything as an absolute. If someone says "dogs have four legs", you might think "well, I saw a dog with three legs, so there's no value in the idea that dogs have four legs, and I'll conclude that if I see tracks from an animal that seems to have four legs, it's impossible to know if it's a dog or a giant centipede". It's a pernicious little quirk of our minds that we fall for this kind of thinking.

To wit. The idea that installers on Windows behaved the way I described is an interesting fact. The idea that a few installers did things in unusual ways is a much less interesting fact. Putting them on the same level robs you of the insight, and if this is a pattern then there are a lot of things you simply can't learn, because an exception could be found.

> 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.

I think you misunderstand. 1-3 are not goals, they're steps to the goal. Linux and BSD have different goals from Windows.

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