Chocolatey is the best option I've found for this on Windows:

Chocolatey was created by Rob Reynolds in 2011 with the simple goal of offering a universal package manager for Windows. Chocolatey is an open source project that provides developers and admins alike a better way to manage Windows software.

You can install & uninstall software from the command line and update everything installed through it with one command.

It's not a real package manager of course. It can't update the operating system, and Windows applications aren't built for modularity and shared libraries the way Linux applications are. But it does automate application management like nothing else. I highly recommend this if you use Windows.

Remember DLL hell in windows 2000? Damn that was rough.

Tbh, with stuff like Winget and the respective GUI apps the process for installing or upgrading software is pretty much the same nowadays.

WinGet: Am I a joke to you?

Windows side of things is getting better though, thanks to winget. Not perfect and it f's up with certain packages but already a lot better than updating by hand.

Missing dependency? Don't you like living away from your parents?

The Windows updating experience, both the system and apps via the Microsoft Store is so fucking bad it's unbelievable. Shit just stops working all the time, updates fail, grinds the whole system to a halt etc.

For several years now I've been unable to update apps in the Microsoft store in one go, I have to open it, click "get updates" and the circular progression bar goes to about 1/5 and then just stops. So I have to close the app, wait a few minutes, open it again and then press the "play" button for every single app that has updates for the download to actually start, nothing else works. It's been the same for Windows 10 and 11 across four different computers.

There was a Windows 10 update several months ago, might even have been last year that just failed for a ton of people and it took months before it was fixed.

I think mixing app and system dependencies is not the best idea, and Linux desktop is still fighting its impact.

When all the apps on a consumer laptop is expected to depend on the same dependencies, the system likely run into dependency hell, which means many apps needs to be downgraded in order to keep older apps working.

This mixture of system dependency and app dependency also prevents users to use the the latest version of an app on a hyper stable base system.

Flatpak basically aim to solve this problem, where each app chooses their own dependencies, so you don't need to downgrade all your app just because one app depends on python 2.7.