Small problem for Linux ? Sure. Big problem for Linux user? Of course.

Except that doesn't really work well for real applications. Static linking GTK means that your application doesn't use the same theme as the rest of the desktop that's running a newer GTK. Static linking sound libraries means that codec plugins don't work, and you need to statically link those too, which can be a legal nightmare. And static linking libc is a horrifically bad idea.

Linux compatibility at the ABI level is an absolute joke. Source compatibility can even be an issue now and then, because so many projects just change the damn API with every release, and distributions generally only ship the latest version of most projects (few distributions ship every 2.x release of Python for example, even though each release has a minor API and ABI breakages).

That's all fairly irrelevant though, since Linux distributions go out of their way to impose entirely artificial barriers to compatibility. Even if you make a solid portable Linux binary, there's no way to make that binary installable in a cross-platform way that doesn't rely on the user opening a shell and having wasted weeks/months/years of their life learning how to use a shell instead of spending their time doing something more important (like spending time with real people, instead of enslaving themselves to babysitting and hand-holding their "time saving" computational apparatus).

Until Linux distributions either agree on a common package manager (and standardize package names, virtual provides, etc.) or agree on shipping a second cross-platform installation tool (there are a ton of these, some of which I believe can even integrate with RPM/DPKG, but if these tools are not installed on the system then installing packages still requires shell magic to install the damn installation tool).

The various framework developers don't put a lot of effort into testing binary compatibility I believe, and that's largely because few people ask for binary compatibility, because binary compatibility is useless on an OS where getting the binaries installed is a nightmare. In turn, companies don't bother trying to make universal binaries because they know it's entirely pointless, and companies that flat out _can't_ release source just don't bother with Linux... which is why a great deal of us still have Windows installations around. The only thing stopping a great deal of those applications being ported to Linux is the fact that they'd be absolutely impossible to install on Linux.

Take a modern game for example. Even assuming the game source was released, you can't package those things in an RPM. They come on DVDs packed to the brim with textures, sounds, musics, meshes, maps, scripts, videos, and so on. Are we supposed to install a single 4.4GB RPM? And then every time there's a minor update to a few models, we're supposed to download a new 4.4GB RPM because there's no standard delta-RPM mechanism shared by all the RPM distros? That doesn't even include Debian/Ubuntu of course.

There needs to be a cross-platform way of installing software -- and I don't even care if it's a graphical frontend to a compilation script to make the GPL fans happy, so long as it can figure out how to install dependencies on its own -- including a way of updating that software in a realistic fashion given all of today's applications' needs, binary compatibility isn't worth testing and developing for on Linux. It's there mostly to make a nice bullet point for a few enterprise distros that don't really need it, and that's it.

In turn, Linux is still just an "appliance" OS and anybody who needs to do more than run a web browser and email client and word processor (which is a far, far greater percentage of users than the Linux desktop advocates continually claim -- I can't name a single person, even my 80+ year old grandparents, who limit themselves to just those three things) simply can't use Linux because the repositories don't include the software they want (be it Bejeweled 2 or their local geneaology club's favorite software package) and there's no possible way they could ever figure out how to install that software even if there was a Linux version.

Linux's future in the mass consumer market, assuming these things don't change (and I'm 100% convinced that they never will), is going to be handhelds and other appliance-like devices... assuming Linux developers can ever manage to beat the popularity of Apple's competing devices, anyway. Which, as of yet and for the forseeable future, they can't. Android and Pre have nothing on the iPhone's sales. And if you care about Linux from an Open Source/Free Software perspective, those Linux devices don't even matter to you because they rely on proprietary software to get full functionality!

I can't stress it enough though. Software installation is Linux's Achilles Heel. Until that's fixed, Linux is a just niche nerd OS in the desktop space.