My daily driver is Linux. I tend to keep the repo version of blender around, as well as the latest(ish) development build.
I booted Windows 11 (a rare occurence, but figured I should update) and uninstalled Blender to install the latest version.
On Linuxc, sudo pacman -S blender.
On Windows, download the installer, right click, open with, installer, and then no less than seven clicks to confirm.
This is why I don’t use Windows as my daily driver.
Never counted the actual clicks. But the portable version is good for fast installation.
Unzip. Add a config folder if needed. Done.
Try Blender Launcher
Has less to do with windows, and more of choices made for the installer.
I use a fork of blender. One click to download from the internet. Right click and unzip the archive. Open the folder and launch blender.
And I don’t have to remember some sudo command involving pacman …
I download the latest portable build (and its .sha256) from https://www.blender.org/download/ to a set of folders (one folder for each major version).
check the download with sha256sum
unzip
make a soft-link of this newest executable up one level in the major-version folder.
in .bashrc, I alias to the link in each major version folder.
then I can launch blender with
$ blender4.1
or
$ blender2.79
as needed.
When opening old .blend files, the first question is “What version of blender was I last working on this file with?” Which is quickly answered in blender’s scripting Console with
D.version
which will answer something like:
(2, 93, 20)
… useful information to know before I try to make changes and overwrite a working file with a newer version of blender.
In short – I never really uninstall a major version of blender… although I do prune the minor-versions from time to time (simply delete the folder for 2.93.6, etc, keeping only the last minor version that I downloaded for each major version). At present, I only have 33.4 Gb of blender versions residing on my computer.
(Note, the minor version numbers reported by D.version don’t actually align with the download minor-version name… but that’s another not too important story.)
Hint:
The OP started to talk about linux but then “switched” to windows… but then… this was no actual question 
I’m on debian …and i do have a ~/bin/ directory in my $PATH with symbolic links to the actual blender archiv extraction directories and named them uptot blender36…
I don’t think there was a question… just a weird flex of some kind…
Quite right - I was just venting. Linux is my daily driver. I have a dual boot option to Windows 11 (which I really only ever boot to update, but updating windows takes an age, so I may play with Blender whilst I’m there).
It was more being curious why the installation on Windows takes so much effort, especially when, as others have commented, you can just download, unzip and off you go.
You probably got it right earlier with it being the choice of installer, but it still seems like a lot of clicking to me, for something that will run standalone anyway.
Well, it’s all in what you’re used to. I can see that if you’re comfortable typing commands, then a few clicks in installers might seem inefficient.
But if you put yourself in the place of someone who does not ever type terminal commands, you’ll probably be able to understand that the way you install software on your Linux box seems rather archaic, and places too much demand on the user to know what to type in the first place.
Like, maybe there’s some long command I can type in a DOS terminal window that will run the blender installer and turn off some confirmation dialogs or something. I have no idea what that command would be, as I would absolutely never want to do it that way.
The example in my original post:
sudo pacman -S blender
Is it. No clicks, no graphical installer. It just installs. And to run, just type
blender
Or use the menu item for your preferred desktop, similar to Windows.
I thought we were just sharing blender setups.
This line caught my eye:
That between uninstallation and (re-)installation there might be a non-zero time-period when blender was unavailable seemed like a preventable tragedy…
I’ve mentioned it elsewhere previously. On the same hardware,on Windows blender takes an age to start, whilst on Linux it’s immediate. Based on comments there, I figured maybe just purge it and start again (it hasn’t helped).
No clicks, but 22 keystrokes. So you “clicked” on the keyboard 3x more than on the mouse in windows.
I mean - if you’re trying to win the battle of “how many times my finger had to press on a thing”, you didn’t win with the command line…
Ohh no…
please no Windows / Linux ; Mouse click / command line ; intuitive / nonintuitve; remember shortcutted commands / remember click positions – flame war…
LOL - I see your point. Although, the Linux way gets all those keypresses out of the way at one go (and using bash history, starting blender could be as little as 3 key presses - possibly two, but that would be tempting fate.
I double click a shortcut on my desktop to launch blender… seems pretty efficient to me.
(And heck, i could drag that shortcut to the task bar and cut it down to 1 click…)
No intention to start any kind of war, flame or otherwise. I use Windows daily for work (nothing to do with 3D: EDIT Actually I use Windows via a VPN and remote desktop on Linux, but such is life), and I use Linux as my daily driver for personal use, with the option to boot Windows if I have to. I understand why people use both.
I posted when annoyed at the time taken to get the latest Blender on my Windows side (which despite the keypress counting, still requires you to navigate to the download site, and download).
But, I have always been, and remain a man of, “to each his own”. I’m certainly not meaning to criticise anyone’s choice. (hence posting this in off-topic).
To be honest, I use cairo-dock, so it’s two clicks for me (I select either the repo version, or the latest nightly) If I was just using one, then it would be one click
There is a small “winky” at the end of my post…
…(sadly ) i’m a bit experienced with “aggressive” user conversations… having spend some time here ( and also i have some trust in @thorn )… so it was just a bit “cheer up”… 
LOL - I missed that tiny wink amongst the other emojis, but I’m not an aggressive user for conversation. so we’re all good