It hasn't been all roses in the windows world. Aside from qt/gtk being just as desirable there, there was also winforms and WPF in .net that are now left out in the cold and no clear forward direction that would also work on windows 7. They seem to be taking an each way bet on whether Win32 is deprecated or not.
Actually, I think this is the situation that lead to the growth in webapps and probably helped the decline (or failure to rise) of windows phone, no one had a clue where MS was going.
WPF is pretty much alive for desktop applications and its architecture (XAML + Blend tooling) is the foundation of UWP applications.
Windows Forms is officially dead as communicated at Build a few years ago. It is now playing chess with Carbon.
MFC is officially on life support. Way forward for C++ developers is UWP.
Everything from Win32 that isn't required for UWP support is deprecated and Project Centipede is the official way to bring Win32 applications into the new shinning UWP world.
Actually, I think this is the situation that lead to the growth in webapps and probably helped the decline (or failure to rise) of windows phone, no one had a clue where MS was going.