It's not proprietary or not, it's the level of discipline about installing software. iOS is completely proprietary and has a very disciplined system for installing and uninstalling apps. The Windows non-system of installers/uninstallers is really anarchy except to the end user it looks like a system because the installers/uninstaller mostly look the same, mainly because
became a defacto standard endorsed by Microsoft and everybody else tries to look like it.
The real Windows "quirk" that this article skirts around is that Windows won't let you delete a file which is open and of course if you are running an executable that counts as an open file. This of course can be a huge hassle if you need to delete something and can't find the process which is holding the file open. It's particularly annoying for things like software builds where you really want a script that automatically and reliably clears a lot of stuff away so you can make a fresh start.
Now, POSIX has the opposite "quirk" that you can "delete" an open file and it completes right away because all you did was delete the link from the directory to the file. The file still exists because it has a link from the process that has it open, it really gets deleted when that link goes away.
That can get you in just as much or more trouble than the way Windows does it can, for instance if some series of events caused your system log to fill the disk, you can "rm" the log and the disk is still full. To really free up the space you need to "rm" and then restart the log daemon.
As for Linux it's got the problem of a proliferation of package managers in the sense of things like flatpak and snap and generally the (dumpster fire I think) of Docker images (like the place where they thought Docker would help stabilize their Python installations but somehow our data scientists kept finding strangely broken Python images that were real nightmare fuel for me; e.g. default character encodings that I didn't think anybody actually used)
Windows has realized the ability to install software in C:/Program Files/ and D:/Program Files/ and often in a user's home directory (if the installer supports it.) 20 years ago I thought rpm's sucked and thought "any software worth installing is worth building from source" where I could do
make-install --prefix=/usr|/usr/local|$HOME
that is I didn't have to beg for my sysadmin to do something like
apt-get install nethack
I am impressed with the comparative speed of installing from a package manager, but I still can't install a local copy of software with one, and I should be able to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstallShield
became a defacto standard endorsed by Microsoft and everybody else tries to look like it.
The real Windows "quirk" that this article skirts around is that Windows won't let you delete a file which is open and of course if you are running an executable that counts as an open file. This of course can be a huge hassle if you need to delete something and can't find the process which is holding the file open. It's particularly annoying for things like software builds where you really want a script that automatically and reliably clears a lot of stuff away so you can make a fresh start.
Now, POSIX has the opposite "quirk" that you can "delete" an open file and it completes right away because all you did was delete the link from the directory to the file. The file still exists because it has a link from the process that has it open, it really gets deleted when that link goes away.
That can get you in just as much or more trouble than the way Windows does it can, for instance if some series of events caused your system log to fill the disk, you can "rm" the log and the disk is still full. To really free up the space you need to "rm" and then restart the log daemon.
As for Linux it's got the problem of a proliferation of package managers in the sense of things like flatpak and snap and generally the (dumpster fire I think) of Docker images (like the place where they thought Docker would help stabilize their Python installations but somehow our data scientists kept finding strangely broken Python images that were real nightmare fuel for me; e.g. default character encodings that I didn't think anybody actually used)
Windows has realized the ability to install software in C:/Program Files/ and D:/Program Files/ and often in a user's home directory (if the installer supports it.) 20 years ago I thought rpm's sucked and thought "any software worth installing is worth building from source" where I could do
that is I didn't have to beg for my sysadmin to do something like I am impressed with the comparative speed of installing from a package manager, but I still can't install a local copy of software with one, and I should be able to.