alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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Propelloni • yesterday at 7:53 PM
You can also run a WinXP exe on any Linux distribution almost every time. That's the point of project and Linus' quip: The only stable ABI around on MS Windows and Linux is Win32 (BTW, I do not agree with this.)
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kccqzy • yesterday at 3:40 PM
That’s actually an intentional nudge to make the software packaged by the distro, which usually implies that they are open source.
Who needs ABI compatibility when your software is OSS? You only need API compatibility at that point.
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Yes and even the package format thing is a hell of its own. Even on Ubuntu you have multiple package formats and sometimes there are even multiple app stores (a Gnome one and an Ubuntu specific if I remember correctly)