I somehow forgot you had to download every program yourself and update it yourself or put up with a third party update app at all times. I’ve only been away from Windows for like a year but it’s like “I completely forgot about that”.

The author exaggerates how bad it is, to be honest. The built in winget package manager solved most of my needs for installing and updating software while I was still using Windows, and what it left is no worse than the situation on Linux. There are also alternatives to winget, like Chocolatey.

In some ways the situation is actually worse on Linux, since I regularly use 4 different package managers on Linux: apt, flatpak, pixi/conda, and uv/pip, on top of having to manually download and install software, some of which I have to compile myself