Sort of agree, the benefits of most linux' distros package managment system combined with lots of open source and gcc binaries being compatible with a quite few

Sort of agree, the benefits of most linux' distros package managment system combined with lots of open source and gcc binaries being compatible with a quite few versions back are obvious. But that doesn't mean they don't exist partly on Windows. "where you must consider VS/msvcrt version, if you are using third party SDKs." is a bit too narrow: that is (afaik) only the case if you use binary distributions of 3rd party libs and only for particular languages like C/C++ and if they make use of the standard libraries and force that upon the user by exporting instances of objects in it - and more often than not I've encountered all sorts of situation where that was not the case: - it's OK to have e.g. a C lib linking against msvcrt x and use it in an application linked against msvcrt y, as long as the API is written properly and doesn't do insane things like trying to free what has been malloc'ed elsewhere - if you have the source, you just build everything with the same VS version and that's it - for C# etc there's a rather decent package manager so that's it as well usually