That makes no sense: shipping all dependencies (e.g. shipping a container image) gives perfect binary compatibility on Linux, which is what flatpak/snap/appimage do.

It can also be achieved with static linking and by shipping all needed library and using a shell script loader that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Also glibc and properly designed libraries are backwards compatible, so in principle just adding the debs/rpms from an older Debian/Fedora that ships the needed libraries to the packaging repositories and running apt/dnf should work in theory, although unfortunately might not in practice due to the general incompetence of programmers and distribution maintainers.

Win32 is obviously not appropriate for GNU/Linux applications, and you also have the same dependency problem here, with the same solution (ship a whole Wine prefix, or maybe ship a bunch of DLLs).

I think this attitude to the Linux ABI is maybe out of date - with a 20 year old Linux binary, that's only 2005, so it will almost certainly be using glibc (no archaic libc5). Glibc has great backwards compatibility and the binary will work on any glibc distribution today as long as you have all the .so's, same as needing the .dll's on Windows.

Sounds like someone wants Lindows/Linspire.

https://www.linspirelinux.com/

Zorin OS supports running .exes directly (via Wine of course). https://help.zorin.com/docs/apps-games/windows-app-support/

> NOTE: I am not against Apple or Microsoft. They have amazing engineers! I don't think they're being malicious. Rather, I think the incentives for these companies are improperly aligned.

Improperly aligned incentives? Who gets to say what that is?

Is it "improper" to maximize profit per their own board's guidelines?

I have a feeling OP has some predefined notion of nobility they expect people to somehow operate under.