[wsc981]

I feel the Mac way is preferable, if possible.

Download a package (disk image) - macOS automatically extracts to the desktop. Drag and drop the application from the disk image into the /Applications directory. Done.

This is the way, I believe, most software should be installed. I understand some stuff might need to touch system files and for that, perhaps a wizard makes sense.

[jeroenhd]

The Mac way kind of depends on how you get your application. Sometimes applications come from the app store, sometimes they're ZIP'ed files that get auto-extracted, sometimes they're in DMGs that are mounted but not extracted, and sometimes they open some kind of install wizard.

Some of them you can open by right-clicking them and hitting open. Others just open directly. There are also apps that throw up an error when you try to open them and you need to go to the security settings to hit an oddly-placed button to open them. Whether or not you've managed to run the program at least once also seems to influence whether or not an app in the applications folder actually shows up in Launchpad.

Windows does half of this too these days, but these days every OS is confusing and needs specific know-how when you just want to run the tool you downloaded.

[ZaoLahma]

It's neat enough, but I still prefer to not have to download stuff, and instead have the available software in a central repository.

There's a reason why projects like Homebrew exist for Mac.

[pidgeon_lover]

Central repositories and package managers are the reason I avoid Linux - I like to keep offline backups of old software. This is extremely difficult on Linux and you have to trust the package managers to keep your software available. I do not trust them to do so, and have faced countless issues at work with package deprecation on industrial Linux boxes. I end up having to manually search for and archive a million DEBs, which I can then manually install, and it ends up just being a very messy and time consuming way of approximating a fraction of Windows/Mac/Android's power.

[int_19h]

Storage and bandwidth are cheap enough these days that you can easily archive the official repo in its entirety (using something like apt-mirror).

[darkwater]

If you are so worried by that you can setup a private repository. It's just a glorified HTTP server...

[tombert]

I've debated trying to run my own Nixpkgs just because I think it would be fun, but I've talked myself out of it because I'm afraid that maintaining it would become a full time job.

[ChocolateGod]

This is only really possible on MacOS where's there's only one target.

Linux is not a single target.