Looking at that page, it looks like syncthing chooses to not provide a Windows service. That is where 100% of the complexity is coming from. If they did provide a Windows service, then it would be as simple as opening the service manager, and setting the startup type from "manual" to "automatic".

It's not fair to blame Windows for the developers of an app not using its features. Similarly, if syncthing didn't bother to create a unit file on Linux, your example would no longer be a simple one liner. That wouldn't be systemd's fault though.

The manual GUI steps could be replaced with single command line on windows too.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...

Powershell exists.

There's sc[1] on Windows for this, though many services can do it themselves, eg

    myservice.exe /install

Of course, the application must support the service interface[2] to do this, which is like providing the .service file for systemd.

The key difference is that it's built into the application[3] in Windows, not external like with systemd, which has pros and cons.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...

[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/services/ser...

[3]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/services/ser...