Imagine any application, server, or system that requires installation from a command line.<p>It could use shell scripts, custom programs, or whatever. What's the best experience and tooling you've ever seen?
Static binary. Compile, move to folder, set permmissions, done.<p>Outside of that, NetBSD. Download "install kernel", write to media, boot, compile an entire system.<p>FreeBSD is also good.<p>Pet peeve: I see lots of tiny system projects that look very cool but only boot from qemu.
The best installation experience is no installation.<p>My favorite: Single binary Hashicorp Nomad, the same binary for client and server! Runs without sudo, straight out of /tmp.
Windows Portable Applications... copy them into a folder, and run them. No installation required.<p>Because there isn't a stable system interface table in Linux (i.e. INT 21, AH=9 prints a $ delimited string in MS-DOS, and has since the 1980s), you can't just run an executable.<p>The closest you're likely to get is Justine's APE - Actually Portable Executable[1] to get something you can distribute and just run.<p>[1] <a href="https://justine.lol/ape.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://justine.lol/ape.html</a>
This probably isn't in the spirit of what you're asking but watching my Dad install Red Hat using Anaconda in the late 90s was pretty sweet. I seem to recall Debian having a similar TUI that I used to load it on my long-obsolete iMac G3 back in college. Good times.
One-line installations: I usually don't like running multiple commands for installing a CLI tool. curl/wget the setup file and execute it.
Single command -> single step -> no friction.
pnpm. Really fast, and user-friendly. Too bad it's not backwards-compatible with npm. I use it for all of my Node.js projects, but I sadly have to use npm when jumping into the frontend of project I volunteer on.<p>Another one would be Nala, I used this as my day-to-day apt frontend before I switched to Fedora. It makes the UX much more better than apt for daily usage.