Comment by sjellis

"The next best thing might be infrastructure that makes the deployment easier but no one's really interested in investing in infrastructure tech without some tangible reward."

Almost every OS vendor is investing in deployment and packaging, because it's perceived that users now expect either zero-install or app store experiences.

The issue is that most OS vendors are incentivized to make themselves gatekeepers and insert themselves into the delivery chain, for financial or security reasons. That always causes conflicting requirements. It's interesting to look at Flatpak, which is not built to privilege an OS vendor, versus almost anything else.