> In short, Windows and MacOS and Android have never taken third party software distribution seriously in the least, and have done nothing to support it. Linux

> In short, Windows and MacOS and Android have never taken third party software distribution seriously in the least, and have done nothing to support it. Linux has built-in support for third-party repositories, and has for decades. They all have sophisticated systems in place specifically to support third party software distribution that works (and is relatively safe): • Windows has the app store, MSI, and MSIX (which allows efficient installs and updates from arbitrary web servers). MSIX is a package manager, by the way. It also has API support for writing AV scanners, managing software deployments across managed networks and so on. • macOS has .dmgs, notarization, Gatekeeper • Android has support for installing APKs from the web with a package identity system that lets anyone self-sign their software. Above all they consider installing apps that aren't controlled by the vendors to be a core feature, so they work hard to provide binary compatibility, bug workarounds, multi-year deprecation cycles, anti-malware scanners and more, all for the benefit of developers who develop their apps independently of the vendors. Linux can be reconfigured with additional repositories, technically, but that feature was originally designed for reducing bandwidth usage with mirrors. It wasn't meant to allow third parties to distribute software on their own schedule, which is why these third party repositories are invariably locked to a specific version of a specific distribution. Developers who complain about this are just told every version of every Linux distribution is a unique OS, and that they should open source their apps to let distributors centrally take ownership of their work. It's changing a bit now with Flatpak. But for the bulk of Linux's history, that was the gig: no supported way to distribute your apps, and third party repositories would come with health warnings from your OS vendor. Not a supported way to use the OS. If it breaks you keep the pieces.