[bigfatkitten]

This is only remotely true for embedded systems, where you ship a fully integrated device, with all its associated peripherals as a turn-key system that does not have to interoperate with anything else.

If you’re in the business of shipping software that needs to run alongside other people’s software on the same machine, it’s a disaster.

Linux userspace backwards compatibility is extremely poor, the “solutions” to this issue (Flatpak, Snap et al) generally create more management problems than they solve. Desktop Linux is already an absolute monster to manage.

Try securely deploying hardware-backed PKI certificates for 802.1x to a fleet of Linux workstations. Takes a couple of minutes on Windows and macOS, but it’s a massive engineering effort on Linux.