There is one major difference: those install under your users. I haven’t seen a windows installer that didn’t require admin. Some older Linux apps require sudo. They don’t need to do that anymore, not for a while. We have xdg standards of where to install stuff in a users home directory.

> Increasingly software is distributed by "curl dodgysite.com/get.sh|sudo bash -"

I don't think this is the norm at all. I have seen curl/bash install scripts for tools like Claude Code, but they don't use sudo, and the expectation is that you deploy them in isolated user accounts or containers.

Nah, install.exe must be signed by a certificate authority or you get 10 prompts, and they do revoke certificates.