Wasn't there also DLL hell on Windows?

My understanding is that very old statically linked Linux images still run today because paraphrasing Linus: "we don't break user space".

> we don't break user space

The kernel doesn't break user space. User space breaks on its own.

Unfortunately you can't really statically link a GUI app.

Also, if you happened to have linked that image to a.out it wouldn't work if you're using a kernel from this year, but that's probably not the case ;)