> the issue is not that you can't do it, the issue is that you have to spend extra work at every corner to get things running, because unlike Windows Linux doesn't take your hand and hide all the nasty bits from you, while it tries to juggle a million cases in the background.

You may have to spend extra work to get things running; but once it's done, it runs forever without a hitch.

I know, I use Slackware. It's regarded as a very technical distribution and some manual configuration is expected but once it's done, it's done. I have configs from > 20 years ago that I still use without a hiccup.

I don't know what are these nasty bits windows is supposedly hiding, or what exactly breaks more often on Linux. For me it's exact opposite: my linux just never breaks. I don't do anything special, just plug in the hdd into new box bought when old gets too slow for new tasks, continue as nothing happened.

Uptimes of half a year are not uncommon, the record so far is 400+ days. I just don't shut it down unless there's a serious kernel or hardware upgrade.

It just works, non-kernel updates, stuff being plugged/unplugged, couple times I swapped sata hdds without turning off power (which is simple, they are hotplug by design, just don't drop the screws onto motherboard and don't forget to unmount+detach first).

Now, when I used to and test some cross-builds for windows (win7-win10 era), I had another dedicated windows machine for that. And even though I tried to make it as stable as possible, it was a brittle piece of junk, in comparison.

So in my experience, yes, linux is fundamentally different usage philosophy: you don't need to think about what crap Microsoft will break your workflow with next Tuesday.

Even if we don't agree on a userspace ABI, this is still fine-ish, as long as you can statically link everything you need. Unfortunately the nerds maintaining the core libraries REALLY don't want you to do that, and the answer to "how do I build a portable Linux GUI program" goes more or less like:

"Build musl libc statically, set up a toolchain to use it, build libc++ for that toolchain, get libwayland, link that statically (which their build scripts don't support, roll your own), get xcb,libxau,libxwhatever and build those statically as well, and implement TWO platform layers, dynamically checking for wayland support. There's like 5 different ways to set your window icon. Yes, you need to implement all of them. Now for loading the graphics API......."

On Windows it's a call to RegisterClassW followed by CreateWindowW.

It's an old joke, but it's also accurate in this case - isn't what you are asking for just WINE?

I think that eventually, Win32/WoW64 will be the stable common API for Linux programs - or at least games. I won't be surprised if it outlasts Windows.

> I want a OS where I don't notice that it's there.

I guess you want a Mac. That's fine.

I value freedom and things not mysteriously breaking and functionality not disappearing, and am quite happy investing a the time and knowledge upfront, so I use Linux.

And then there are people who want to have a system which works out of the box initially and who don't want to learn anything and don't mind it breaking later, and they choose Windows.

To each their own.