"That's no gun. Now, if you'd come at me with S-Mart's top of the line twelve-gauge, double-barreled Remington from the sporting goods department, that would be different. Made in Grand Rapids, Michigan, retailing for $109.95 with a walnut stock, cobalt-blue steel, and a hair trigger, it is the only gun I would carry. That's right... shop smart: shop S-Mart... YA GOT THAT?! Now I swear, the next one of you primates even thinks about aiming their pea shooter at me..." -- Ash
tl;dr; M$ is panicking over potential lost marketshare and wants you to come back to daddy instead of standing on your own two feet by giving Linux a chance. M$ promises it won't hit you again. That was old M$, new M$ will be respectable to you and your data. Don't leave now.
You're correct, I was mistaken about the AppImages being mentioned by you. That happened in https://piefed.social/comment/12066178 instead.
I'm still out of the conversation though. Have fun with it.
You're the problem in this conversation because you keep tripping over the smallest things. You start talking about how there's no update process for AppImages and then you tell me not to talk about updates but only talk about installing things when I comment on that. You're indistinguishable from a sealion right now, so I'm out of this conversation. I never said Linux was perfect, that was a figment of your imagination. I just said that every OS has a learning curve. Stick with what you like or work to help fix what you don't like. Yapping about it in the way you have done so far is not helping anyone.
The same goes for Windows. Someone who grew up on Macs will have to learn the particularities of Windows or Linux just the same if they wanted to switch to either. Every user has got to put their own effort into learning the ropes. It is no different with anything else in life. You can't just expect everything to be handed to you on a silver platter. I grew up on MS-DOS and Commodore BASIC. Then came Windows 3.x and GEOS, Workbench on the Amiga, and eventually Windows 95. I had to learn each and every one of their particularities as I moved between them. Windows XP? Windows 7? Windows 10? Each one came with changes people complained about. Mac has had its upsets as well. Linux changed from its UNIX beginnings to have the variation we have today. Find something which looks like you want to learn the ropes and stick with it. Or don't and go touch some grass, I guess.
KDE Discover; search for app, install. You don't even have to download an exe because Discover just installs it for you. Has plugins to work with Flatpak and snap as well. So that's one step less. Since it's one step less, does that immediately make it better?
I only have to look at the family members I have who have dozens of versions of .exe and .msi installers for the same program littering their Downloads folder, and then for some reason those unpack to subfolders in C:\ and leave their unpacked installer files there without any good reason for it.
Why not just use the temp folder and remove them afterward?
That's on top of Windows itself littering the drive with temporary files, installer files or otherwise.
People who have been using Windows since the early days are still trying to figure out how to clean up after it, and every iteration is made more confusing by Microsoft.
Cleaning up installers when pulling things in through your package manager is a cakewalk in comparison.
Considering how appimages are mostly self-contained there's little to clean other than the single file which you run it through, and the few configurations left in ~/.config or ~/.local/share. Easy peasy.
I have less experience with Flatpak but I'm sure it's similarily easy to find out. I'm never touching snap again after trying it once because it's beyond dumb.
Of course if you build from source through git or otherwise, you're going to have to make sure you remember where you put things.
Everything on Windows is just so much more confusing than it has to be. And that's without touching on the whole licensing bs or the way you may find some programs in the installed program list in the system configuration window and some aren't in there for reasons unknown... Where's the uninstaller in that case? Oh, the uninstaller isn't there anymore? Try and figure out how to uninstall the program that doesn't want to uninstall.
Let's take programs like Avira or Avast or whatever program which embeds itself in your registry and five or six different folders. You try to uninstall it, it claims to have uninstalled, but then Revo still finds thirty different registry entries and whatnot.
Just as an aside; dogs have no hands. They have paws.