> It seemed like Microsoft's product complexity and dedication to backwards compatibility of software would make them the ones to move software management forward.
That's precisely why they _didn't_ go with the package manager model of software distribution.
Package managers in most distros assume that everything you download via apt/dnf is a part of the operating system and integrates with whatever dependencies the OS ships with. It's a great system if you're an operating system maintainer, but terrible if you're a third-party software developer who has no interest in dealing with 5-6 different OS's repo formats and dependency versions. On Windows and macOS, you vendor most everything, provide runtime installers for the rest, and that's usually enough to be resilient to bitrot.
Package formats like Flatpak, Snap and AppImage are the only projects who seem to be taking the problem of software distribution on Linux seriously, and of those only Flatpak seems to have the mature tooling and lack of myopia necessary to pull it off. For the times that I do miss apt on Windows, chocolatey is pretty good at installing software and vcpkg works great for linkable libraries.
The state space doesn't have the conveniences that linux and language tools leverage, that's why I wanted to see them try to advance the field beyond what we have now.
Which conveniences are you talking about? Chocolatey gives me the "automatically updating my programs" experience, and vendoring dependencies with vcpkg is about as turnkey as it gets - add a git submodule to your project, reference the vcpkg toolchain in your CMakeLists.txt file, and you're done.
That's precisely why they _didn't_ go with the package manager model of software distribution.
Package managers in most distros assume that everything you download via apt/dnf is a part of the operating system and integrates with whatever dependencies the OS ships with. It's a great system if you're an operating system maintainer, but terrible if you're a third-party software developer who has no interest in dealing with 5-6 different OS's repo formats and dependency versions. On Windows and macOS, you vendor most everything, provide runtime installers for the rest, and that's usually enough to be resilient to bitrot.
Package formats like Flatpak, Snap and AppImage are the only projects who seem to be taking the problem of software distribution on Linux seriously, and of those only Flatpak seems to have the mature tooling and lack of myopia necessary to pull it off. For the times that I do miss apt on Windows, chocolatey is pretty good at installing software and vcpkg works great for linkable libraries.