Uh, you can load ICC profiles on both Linux and Windows. On my Thinkpad X201 it was a hard requirement if you didn't want your eyes to bleed, without the profile it was like staring into a bug zapper it was so blue.
This is a super common misunderstanding. When you load an ICC profile into "the system", sometimes all the colors everywhere change, because many ICC profiles contain (non-standard) RGB gamma ramps. Those are 1D per-channel LUTs - the same ballpark as changing the "R G B" values in a monitor's OSD; they can't do color-space conversions. The reason this is done is essentially to reduce numerical artifacts when a color-managed application uses the profile. [1] The reason why it's global is because gamma ramps are part of the scanout system (display interface) in a graphics adapter.
This effect makes it look like the entire system is color-managed when in fact the opposite is true.
[1] Any profile that has been created with gamma ramps has to be used system wide and specified in color-managed applications, because the standard color transforms in the profile are calculated to be correct when the gamma ramps are in place. If you skip either step, you'll get wrong results.
Wouldn't it be possible to do a vector product with the wrong RGB gamma ramp to get a resulting color profile that would work system-wide? (as it may be easier to change the color profile than the RGB gamma ramp)
