You're being disingenuous. Every platform requires support, which takes time. It's unreasonable to expect Linux to be an exception to this and not take any time. If you planned on Linux being the special platform which doesn't cost anything to develop for, your disappointment is due to unreasonable expectations.

Linux is the exception because the support burden is much, much higher per user because "Linux" is a catch-all for what is really several operating systems that share a kernel and some userland code, so supporting Linux is much harder than supporting, say, Windows.

Yeah, you can support Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2K, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 10, Windows CE, Windows with single simple exe file, while Linux users needs to execute complex commands, such as "yum install package", to install install software which will perfectly match their environment only.

You know as well as everyone here that "Windows support" generally means two or at most three versions of Windows, and that adjacent Windows versions are a lot more intercompatable than any pair of Linux distros. What do you gain by pretending to be stupid?

It's really a problem with two dimensions. There's versions of the same OS, and then there's incompatible operating systems. You can kinda make the case for Windows being three different OSes, but the Win3.1/Win95 tree has been dead for over a decade, and Windows CE was never really positioned as being compatible with other Windows anyway.

And it's not like Linux doesn't come in versions, and it's not like a change in versions doesn't have similar compatibility concerns as it does in Windows. (Honestly, I think it's worse on Linux -- it is a lot easier to run the same version of, say, MySQL on consecutive releases of Windows than it is on RHEL/CentOS.)

So post-XP, where Windows NT ate DOS-based Windows, you have Windows progressing version to version -- Vista, 7, 8, 10. You can see the same progression in Linux OSes -- Debian goes Etch, Lenny, Squeeze, Wheezy, Jessie over a similar timeframe. But at the same time, Fedora runs from version 6 around Vista's launch to version 23 due out in a few months from now. So, like Windows, you have a concern with making an application run on both, say, Squeeze and Wheezy. But you also have an additional problem where you need to make it work on Beefy Miracle. For most software Linux users come into contact with, developers will write software for one, maybe two distros or so, and each distro ports the software over, essentially. So every open-source project is essentially forked by each distro. It's not a model conducive to closed-source software. Which... there are plenty of people who are openly happy about this, as they would rather encourage open-source software over closed source, so it's not like this is strictly an accident or a mistake. But if you want to ask why games don't get Linux ports, or get Linux ports that involve running the Windows version in a Wine wrapper, that's a big part of the answer.

Commercial developers from Windows world are missing huge paradigm shift which happens outside of Windows world: there is no installers anymore. You cannot install Android app on drive C: or drive D:, you cannot install GMail into c:\googleapps, you cannot do "yum install --from app.exe --to c:/myapps", etc.

What will happen if Google will provide installers for all their services instead of publishing them on the web, if Android developers will do same instead of publishing in PlayMarket? How much support they will need to cover all hardware and software?

There is no problem with supporting of whole Linux, on all OS'es and HW if you understanding it. Opensource developers are doing that for free.

To support 3 major versions of Windows in at least two localizations and in few flavors (home, pro, server, etc.) with different set of software installed, which may affect installation process, you need farm of Windows machines and extensive testing. It looks like that to test various Linux distributions you need a lot more hardware and time resources, because there is so many of them.

In reality, to support a linux distribution, you need to install distribution in a virtual machine, install your application manually (on your side, not at client side, so you can skip all bells and whistles), package result, then publish result into your own repository. So to support 10 major distributions, I need 10 virtual images and about 10 days. Feel the difference.

PS. Sorry, my English is not perfect. I cannot even talk in English.

See below.

Lol yeah try running a windows 95 game in windows 8 for fun you will see most of them fail