You can, on Windows. The secret is the system keeping backwards compatibility in mind for its core APIs, something that most desktop APIs on Unix (outside of X11) do not do.
(now the asterisk: in terms of functionality above and taking an average desktop distribution in mind you'd probably find more of it in Linux, but applications can't rely on most of that functionality being available on all distros as a "standard" and even for the stuff they could expect, way more often than not they rely on specific version ranges - e.g. an application cannot rely on "Gtk", it can only rely on "Gtk <version>.xxx", as Gtk itself isn't backwards compatible across major versions).