> Clearly I'm wrong, but how is it that windows can have portable apps of a similar size to their installable versions and Linux cann They can't depend on man

> Clearly I'm wrong, but how is it that windows can have portable apps of a similar size to their installable versions and Linux cann They can't depend on many apis existing or at the right version. Linux distros are made from a collection of various third party projects and distros just integrate those. Each of these third party projects has it's own development speed and ABI and API stability policies. Each distro also has it's own development speed and release policy, which means they might have things that could either be too new or to old. Most distros try to avoid packaging multiple versions of the same project when they can avoid it to ease maintenance as well. Heck, you can't even guarantee that you have the exact same libc. Most distros use glibc, but there are plenty of systems that use musl.