Ah apologies, you're right - I was tired and read things wrong.
But I suspect "GL issues" (i.e., GL API stability) is being mixed together with e.g. mesa issues if mesa is being bundled inside the app/in a "flatpak SDK" instead of being treated as a system library akin to what you would do with DirectX.
Mesa contains your graphics driver and window system integrations, so when the system changes so must mesa change - but the ABI exposed to clients does not change, other than new features being added.
Of course it does. Their goal was to stop it from being added, including in said towns.
Policy makers make things happen by passing laws that make it a requirement or provide financial incentives to do it, and make things stop by outlawing it or taxing it. It is what they are elected to do.
This is not "big government" - democracy does not mean that small groups that disagree should be allowed to do whatever they want, and water additives is a quite signficant thing to mess with.
Sure, win32 contains GUI bits, but modern apps do not use those GUI bits.
OpenGL and Vulkan ABIs are also stable on Linux, provided by mesa. The post is pretty focused on the simplicity of win32 though, which is what I'm refuting as being as relevant today for new apps.
> As long as they didn't pull a Hyrum's Law on you
It is guaranteed that they "pull a Hyrum's Law", the question is just what apparent behavior they relied on.
These are however the same on Linux - mesa may change, but what the app uses is OpenGL and GLX. A more modern app might use EGL instead of GLX, or have switched to Vulkan, but that doesn't break old code.
You can also run an old mesa from the time the app was built if it supports your newer hardware, but I'd rather consider that to be part of the platform the same way you'd consider the DirectX libraries to be part of windows.