I thought we&#x27;re talking about users here, not developers.<p>Steam, Mathematica, Mendeley Desktop etc. have long proven that stable API for GUI toolkit doesn&#x27;t have to be an issue for users.<p>&gt; For application developers there is a consistent set of APIs that are expected to exist in each version of Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS, Windows Phone...<p>This problem you&#x27;re referring to isn&#x27;t something inherent in or specific to Linux.<p>On Windows, the very same problem exists and is known as DLL hell.
Android is another Linux distribution, and you&#x27;re talking about Java programs running on top of a VM on top of it. Java programs work just fine on Linux too.<p>I belive you&#x27;re talking about Cocoa and Win32 API.<p>On Unix, there is POSIX and X11 which go way back. And there are many GUI toolkits (including but not limited to Qt and wxWindows) that allow you to statically ship your program, with the added bonus of being cross-platform.<p>API isn&#x27;t an issue that can&#x27;t be solved for developers either.<p>&gt; On GNU&#x2F;Linux one needs to bundle the libraries with the application, preferably static linked. But no one is going to do with with GNOME or KDE applications, for example.<p>Yes, they can and they do ship statically linked binaries. While they don&#x27;t generally use Qt or GTK, both promise binary compatibility with a major version.<p>They don&#x27;t need to make it a GNOME or KDE apps to run it under X11.<p>&gt; Then there are the deviations each GNU&#x2F;Linux distribution does from UNIX daemon management and paths.<p>Can you be more specific about the problem you&#x27;re referring to? Are you talking about a particular closed-source daemon program that uses something other than &#x2F;etc&#x2F;init.d or systemd (which has sysv init compatibility layer)?