Dancing to a proprietary tune is risky - they can decide to change the API or go after you with lawsuits if it becomes too competitive. You can provide backwar

Dancing to a proprietary tune is risky - they can decide to change the API or go after you with lawsuits if it becomes too competitive. You can provide backwards compatibility in Linux - you can keep old versions of libraries installed. The more commercial distros do this to a greater degree. It's roughly what windows is doing to achieve the same result. It's just a cost to arrange and since most distros aren't making billions in licensing they choose not to pay it. Obviously I have nothing against a wine-focused distro but I wouldn't myself waste a fraction of a second writing code against the windows API by choice.