alt Hacker NewsThis might offend some people but even Linus Torvalds thinks that the ABI compatibility is not good enough in Linux distros, and this is one of the main reasons Linux is not popular on the desktop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8&t=283s
Replies
AppImage, theoretically, solves this problem (or FlatPak I guess). The issue would really be in getting people to package up dead/abandoned software.
While true in many respects (still), it's worth pointing out that this take is 12 years old.
I agree 100% with Linus. I can run a WinXP exe on Win10 or 11 almost every time, but on Linux I often have to chase down versions that still work with the latest Mint or Ubuntu distros. Stuff that worked before just breaks, especially if the app isn’t in the repo.
This might be why OpenBSD looks attractive to some. Its kernel and all the different applications are fully integrated with each other -- no distros! It also tries to be simple, I believe, which makes it more secure and overall less buggy.
To be honest, I think OSes are boring, and should have been that way since maybe 1995. The basic notions:
multi-processing, context switching, tree-like file systems, multiple users, access privileges,
tree-like file systems, WIMP GUIs, per-user privileges, the fuzziness of what an
"operating system" even is and its role,
ZFS (which implements in a very well-engineered manner a tree-like data storage that's
been standard since the '60s) can serve as a founation for
Postgres (which implements a better-conceived relational design)
anarchy of packaging systems, breaking upgrades and updates,
unstable glibc, desktop environments that are different and changing seemingly
for the sake of it, sound that's kept breaking, power management iffiness, etc.Android makes a sport of breaking ABI compatibly and it hasn't stopped it from being the most popular mobile OS
What's interesting to think about is Conway's law and monorepos and the Linux kernel and userland. If it were all just one big repo, then making breaking changes, wouldn't. The whole ifconfig > ip debacle is an example of where one giant monorepo would have changed how things happened.
To quote a friend; "Glibc is a waste of a perfectly good stable kernel ABI"