I remember some funny problems with Glibc, like, 20 years ago, but it's been invisible to me (as a user) since then. You get a new Glibc, old binaries still work, it's fine.
Just like with Windows the challenges affect developers rather than users.
> You get a new Glibc, old binaries still work, it's fine.
Indeed, but when you need to build for an older glibc it's not so simple. This is a common use case, since e.g. AWS's environments are on glibc 2.26.
Ideally you'd like to build for all targets, including older systems, from a single, modern environment (this is trivial in Windows) -- and you can do some gymnastics to make that happen[1] -- but in practice it's easier to just manage different build environments for different targets. This is partly why building Linux wheels is so convoluted for Python[2].
Hardly a world-ending problem, but my point is simply that C runtimes are a pain everywhere.
> Ideally you'd like to build for all targets, including older systems, from a single, modern environment (this is trivial in Windows)
https://github.com/sjmulder/netwake does what you're talking about, but it does a lot of gymnastics to make it work, and it also needs to use MinGW rather than MSVC for that to be the case.
I'm pretty sure I've run into binaries breaking on new versions of Glibc but maybe it's because the architecture or calling convention changed. I've never really gotten the sense that GNU cares much about binary compatibility (which makes sense, they argue that sharing binaries is mostly counter productive.)
I remember some funny problems with Glibc, like, 20 years ago, but it's been invisible to me (as a user) since then. You get a new Glibc, old binaries still work, it's fine.