It is more confusing on Windows though.

I only have to look at the family members I have who have dozens of versions of .exe and .msi installers for the same program littering their Downloads folder, and then for some reason those unpack to subfolders in C:\ and leave their unpacked installer files there without any good reason for it.

Why not just use the temp folder and remove them afterward?

That's on top of Windows itself littering the drive with temporary files, installer files or otherwise.

People who have been using Windows since the early days are still trying to figure out how to clean up after it, and every iteration is made more confusing by Microsoft.

Cleaning up installers when pulling things in through your package manager is a cakewalk in comparison.

Considering how appimages are mostly self-contained there's little to clean other than the single file which you run it through, and the few configurations left in ~/.config or ~/.local/share. Easy peasy.

I have less experience with Flatpak but I'm sure it's similarily easy to find out. I'm never touching snap again after trying it once because it's beyond dumb.

Of course if you build from source through git or otherwise, you're going to have to make sure you remember where you put things.

Everything on Windows is just so much more confusing than it has to be. And that's without touching on the whole licensing bs or the way you may find some programs in the installed program list in the system configuration window and some aren't in there for reasons unknown... Where's the uninstaller in that case? Oh, the uninstaller isn't there anymore? Try and figure out how to uninstall the program that doesn't want to uninstall.

Let's take programs like Avira or Avast or whatever program which embeds itself in your registry and five or six different folders. You try to uninstall it, it claims to have uninstalled, but then Revo still finds thirty different registry entries and whatnot.

It's easier on Linux. By far.

In my experience AppImages will tell you when a new version is available and you can easily replace the old version with the new one when that happens. It's just a simple download. You're in control. Don't want to update because the new version glitches out or changed something you don't like? Just keep using the old version.

If you want bleeding edge upgrades, you're going to have to keep in mind the words used to described it. You're going to be the canary in the coalmine, dealing with bugs and oddities which users on slower update cycles don't have anymore because they use your experiences and bug reports to fix what breaks.

It certainly sounds to me like you're in your own way, and are putting the blame on devs instead of your choice. You want the newest packages but without bugs? That situation simply doesn't exist.