[rfoo]

One key difference is the OS <-> application interface is defined as a group of system provided dynamic libraries on Windows, not syscalls. So Windows effectively provides a set of very reliable core libraries that is guaranteed to be backward compatible. And as long as you don't use newly added APIs, also forward compatible. While on Linux even libc is decoupled from the kernel, each distribution uses a different version, the application cannot distribute its own libc in any sane way, and the glibc choose to use ELF symbol version to make incompatible changes to frequently used APIs (like memcpy), sabotage bidirectional compatible attempts.

Oh, and there are only one Windows distribution. Not at least 3 major ones.

These both make packaging for Linux hard (requiring kinda funny solutions wrapping up a sysroot as a whole, like Snap or AppImage), while on Windows, the developer builds an exe, and voila, it works everywhere, even on very old systems. There are simply no funky stuffs e.g. glibc symbol version issue.