From having worked on Windows, OSX, and Linux desktop software over the years there's a few factors at play off the top of my head: - Windows DLLs don't usuall

From having worked on Windows, OSX, and Linux desktop software over the years there's a few factors at play off the top of my head: - Windows DLLs don't usually have strong versioning baked into the filename. On OSX or Linux, there's usually the full version number baked in (libfoo.so.3.32.0) with symlinks stripping off version components. (libfoo.so, libfoo.so.3, libfoo.so.3.32) would all be symlinks to libfoo.so.3.32.0 and you can link against whichever major/minor/patch version you depend on. If your Windows app depends on a specific version it's going to be opening DLLs and querying them to find out what they are. - Native OSX software (not Electron) seems to depend much less on piles of external libraries because the OSX standard library is very rich and has a solid history of not breaking APIs and ABI across OS versions. While eg CoreAudio is guaranteed to be installed on an OSX install and be either compatible or discoverably-incompatible, the version of DirectSound you're going to have access to on Windows is more of a crapshoot. - Windows apps (except for the .Net runtime sometimes) are often designed for longevity. A couple of months ago I installed some software that was released in 1999 on my Windows 11 machine and it just worked. Bundling up those DLLs is part of why they work. - Linux apps can rely on downstream packaging to install the necessary shared libraries on demand, generally speaking. Linux desktop apps distributed as RPMs or DEBs can "just" declare which libraries they need and get them delivered during install.