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.

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.

somepackage requires otherpackage version >10.1.79

otherpackage is already at latest version

Have fun compiling it yourself and messing up what is managed by the package manager and what's not. And don't forget that the update might break some other package along the way

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

If I had seen this type of content when I was discovering Linux, I'd have probably stayed with Windows...

I've been a Linux user on and off since 1996, and there are still times when I give up trying to install software because of cryptic error messages.

Yes, I had my parents using Linux Mint for about 5 years, but eventually my brother who lived near them switched them to Windows because if there was a problem with Linux he couldn't help.

Don't worry, this is definitely the year of the Linux desktop.