The main difference is that most Windows apps are statically linked. A game from 1998 will very often come with its own set of .dlls that were built with the game and unless the underlying Win32 api changed, they should "just work". On Linux it's also possible to statically link libs, but it's far less common to do so - most apps rely on the libs in the system. Which in theory is a great thing, your app will always use the latest, safest version of whatever library it needs(while the windows app continues using the unsafe 1998 version of libs for instance). But of course in practice people who make the libs can't test their changes with every single app in existence, so inevitably the back compatibility gets broken, and Linux does have the issue of "oh I installed some system updates and now this app that always worked doesn't work anymore". Again, in theory apps are supposed to say which libs they need and package managers should respect that. But theory and real life are not necessarily the same.