[cpfohl]

Oh yes. Users who don't know how to crop a photo w/out Photoshop are totally using a Package Manager and the command line to install stuff. </sarcasm>

Chocolatey is great, but unfortunately package managers don't work for every piece of software on every OS. Period.

[dhamidi]

How are app stores (something which users are used to already) different from package managers with a user-friendly GUI?

[Arelius]

I think the big difference is that they come with the OSes that those types of people are likely to use. And being stores, they provide software that package managers are unlikely to provide.

I think package managers becomes less useful to average users when you can't expect all of your software to be there.

[Igglyboo]

The only thing I can think of is that they don't really install OS level stuff, think software libraries or runtimes etc.

Other than that they're literally identical to something like synaptic.

[_ea1k]

On Android they sometimes do install OS level stuff (libraries, etc). I think he has a good point.

The biggest difference I see is that package managers on most Linux distributions are designed to be extensible to support other sources. Application stores generally are not.