And on Windows the default way to bundle an application is "make a separate directory for that application, put everything you need inside it" which is kinda equivalent to Linux "/opt" packages, IIRC? Anyway, that neatly combines with the lookup rules for .dlls (they're first searched next to the executable file itself) so that shipping mostly self-contained applications is sorta easy: the applications by default use their packaged libraries, and if those are missing, the system libraries or libraries from PATH are used.

> On Windows, .dll files are automatically searched in quite a few places, including current directory, directory where .exe was launched from, and PATH environment variable. Meaning it is far easier for apps to ship private libraries.

You can get the same behavior on Linux by linking with -Wl,-rpath,\$ORIGIN (minus the PATH env var, use LD_LIBRARY_PATH for that).