On Win32 you don't static link everything, all OS functionality is provided through shared libraries (aka DLLs), the OS provides a ton more functionality out of

On Win32 you don't static link everything, all OS functionality is provided through shared libraries (aka DLLs), the OS provides a ton more functionality out of the box (GUI, multimedia, input, graphics, etc) than you'd get with Linux, which while it provides strong backwards compatibility is just the kernel and practically everything else a regular desktop program uses is provided by libraries talking with it. The big difference isn't static vs dynamic but that on Windows the DLLs that come with the OS do not break backwards compatibility so applications can rely on them whereas on Linux only a very tiny number of libraries do not break backwards compatibility (from the top of my head that'd be glibc[0], X11/Xlib/etc, curl and OpenGL). Most importantly the libraries for making a GUI application do tend to break backwards compatibility (see the breakage in Gtk1->Gtk2->Gtk3->Gtk4 and Qt1->Qt2->Qt3->Qt4->Qt5->Qt6 though with the latter being C++ they can't help it as C++ itself makes it harder with not having a stable ABI). Not all do (AFAIK Motif has been backwards compatible since the early 90s) but those that don't aren't that common (for unrelated reasons - e.g. most provide only a small fraction of the functionality Gtk/Qt provide or, in cases like Motif, the license was unpopular with FLOSS developers so no ecosystem was built around it). [0] they do break compatibility for programs using unsupported APIs though