> First of all you HAVE to ship the source code if you want it to keep working on every machine because people need to compile it on their machine for it to work, so you're practically forced to open source your desktop app. I know the notion of having a closed source app on Linux sounds weird, but it's more weird that this isn't an option as a side-effect of the how the whole system is designed.

That's so very not true.

Most Linux distros allows for custom repositories. So you can just setup the build infrastructure on your side and then have the users include your repos on their side. No need to open source code and users have painless update notifications.

> It's only on Linux that I feel like the developer is pressured to open source it and make it the user's problem because the system won't provide support.

Lots of users have never seen the source code of their software, they just get the binary package. The pressure you're talking about is imaginary.