[levosmetalo]

You don't need any of that, but not because Windows is somehow "better" but because it's Windows "culture" to package almost all dependencies with the application, while on Linux application use a bunch of libraries that are part of the distribution.

[throwaway8581]

No. On Linux, the only stable ABI is the kernel. On Windows, the stable ABI and API includes many platform components outside of the kernel (in fact, the syscall interface itself is undocumented and NOT backward compatible on Windows). The Windows platform APIs are very expansive and cover a lot of territory that on Linux is covered by non-ABI-stable dependencies.

[passivate]

How is it not better for the end user?