I wish you were joking, but one of the giant companies we work with as a supplier suggested we switch to the Windows version of their (desktop) software, running it under Wine.

In fact they told us they have plans to discountinue the true native Linux version, and going forward. they're going to package their Windows version with their version of Wine as the 'native' Linux solution.

This is a company that has both tremendous resources and deep Linux expertise.

I've been wondering if a linux GUI applucation can be made by compiling wine libraries into a linux ELF executable, skipping the EXE format. Do I still need the wine supporting extra processes or is this shippable?

I know I'm probably going to get some shit for this, but, this actually is one of the reasons I like using Rust. I know, I know, but, the fact that cargo can be used as a package manager universally across distros (and operating systems!) is a pretty huge boon to me as a developer.

Zero (Linux) package manager involvement and onerous rules.

I mean it's a general sign of the times across all of computing that problems keep getting solved wrong at all levels of the stack, and since the low level implementation can't be relied on for some reason, an implementation gets stacked on top.

More specifically to your case, Linux package management is an unmitigated disaster when it comes to development. Having to have root access just to install a few headers of whatever version your distro happens to ship with, have some scripts discover said versions (too bad if they are not the ones you wanted).

Every single professional (for profit model) piece of software tends to carry half the userland with it. Steam, Spotify etc..

Besides, Rust isn't big on the concept of dynamic libraries anyways, which once again, I don't think is a purely good thing, but there are a lot of arguments can be made pro or contra.

Let's just say it's a devil we know, which is more than can be said about a lot of other approaches.