> For instance, Windows binary deployments are quite predictable (and often dead simple; so easy a lot of Windows installers get it wrong and yet still work), b

> For instance, Windows binary deployments are quite predictable (and often dead simple; so easy a lot of Windows installers get it wrong and yet still work), but on nix you may have to fight distro differences in libc or get a dozen different answers on what you should statically link in your compile versus what you "must" dynamically link and a half-dozen different installers/bundlers/distro tools to deal with making sure the shared libraries are both installed and correctly linked to. What "just works" is often relative and the magic is very easily dispelled in that terrible state of "why isn't this working?", especially if it "just works" like magic for other people. That's only if you're working with C / C++ though. Switch to Go, Java or basically nearly any other language, and most of your cross platform headaches go away. Though for what it's worth, half those problems aren't really problems you'd generally have to get your hands dirty with as your tooling and distro should manage that for you (just so long as you write POSIX code that is). I'll grant you I've not done anything too complex in C++ but what I have done was portable between Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD (the 3 systems I needed those POSIX C++ programs to target). That was compiling on those respective platforms rather than compiling for those platforms then packaging them up for deployment. I've written a lot of code over the last 30 years and shipped it in a plethora of different ways and creating installers has historically definitely been easier on Windows. No question. Go lang is helping somewhat in that it's now really easy to ship a dependency free binary. But Windows is only one platform and one that creates more problems for cross-platform portability than all of the rest of the big platforms put together.