Packaging software for Windows is clearly a pain, because every time I install a game I get a download, followed by a launcher, followed by one or several MSVC++ runtimes, then another download, then some kind of extraction phase, a restart and then a menu. Unless I'm one of the first people to download the game, of course, because then I get a popup stating that the file I downloaded can't be trusted and that I should delete it.

It's an automated Rube Goldberg machine. Linux used to have these as well! I remember clearly the hacky automated Java 6 install script and the VirtualBox drivers that came as a several executable hundred megabytes in size.

You can static link if you want. You need to watch out for core system libraries like glibc (just like you need to watch out for Win7/8.1/10/11 on Windows) but that's about it.

Packaging for Linux is easy. You can even automatically test if your packages work on different distributions! You can read about it here: https://appimage-builder.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro/tuto...