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I have little Linux experience, so pardon me for asking silly questions. Doesn't Linux then choose a weird place to put the border between "OS" and "userspace"?

I have little Linux experience, so pardon me for asking silly questions. Doesn't Linux then choose a weird place to put the border between "OS" and "userspace"? If, say, an opengl library or an ssl library installed by the distribution breaks backward compat with earlier versions, how is that not the OS breaking backward compat? Sure, if a user hand-installs some new library version, globally in the system, --force, y y y, then I get it. Things will break. But that's not what's going on, right? It feels a bit weird to see the kernel folks put so much effort into "never breaking userland" only to have the distributions throw that all away with a "yolo, the new libyadayada is 1% faster and who cares about old programs!" kind of attitude. Is that really how this works? Or am I just misunderstanding some nuance? I'm not trying to be critical on anyone btw, I'm just trying to understand what's going on :-)

majewsky 8y ago
> Doesn't Linux then choose a weird place to put the border between "OS" and "userspace"? Your fallacy is assuming that "Linux" is a single entity with a single mind. Linus is very strict about backwards compatibility, but he only controls the kernel, not glibc or Mesa or KDE.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  there's a reason people don't use linux outside of the server space and most of it is every piece of weirdness introduced above linus. the more esoteric your linux flavor(and closer to bare metal it is), the better your linux experience long term.
  - sascha_sl 8y ago
    A dependency is a dependency. The distro does not matter. It matters what the game depends on and what the distro ships. Or, you know, snaps and appimage and flatpack. Where your only hard dependency becomes Linux. Which doesn't break userspace. Some early linux games made the mistake of using low level graphics libraries (not one of the opengl levels), these might not work because the newest drivers just don't support it.
    - kkarakk 8y ago
      To the end user none of that matters, all they know is that this thing does not "just work". windows and macos has that, no flavor of linux does(currently). i look forward to the snap/appimage/flatpack war, it's long overdue
      - dwighttk 8y ago
        Eh, macOS breaks old apps like it makes Apple money.
        chronogram 8y ago
        Like Aperture from what.. 2014? Won’t run on the next macOS.. that’s an Apple application that can’t last more than a few years on an Apple system. Even Linux desktops are better than that, but not much better. They seem so emotional.
        badsectoracula 8y ago
        And that was for me the main reason i stopped using macOS, as every new version of the operating system made software i had paid money for stop working - to the point that nothing works now.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      Except that Snaps and Flatpack are over-engineered inflexible garbage compared to how this is handled in sane environments. Flatpack can't even handle the concept of installing to different media without building a brand new repository on it FFS (I don't know if this is true of Snap because it is far too Canonical-centric for my tastes). There's no reason it has to be like this. Even AppImage is slightly over-engineered in my opinion, but otherwise the only real failing of it is that since there's no standard for ELF embedded icons (wtf is wrong with UNIX devs!?) it's a shit-show to get them to show up as anything other than a generic one. This isn't hard, Linux people. Just standardize on a set of core libraries and stop breaking ABI outside of major versions, then you'll magically have this thing we call a "platform" upon which applications can run without being recompiled.
- DannyBee 8y ago
  Sure, but that just means a failure of Linux as a product experience. Users don't make that distinction, even a little bit. This is also arguably a failure of the open source model in practice (though not in theory). It tends to generate projects that are really good at infrastructure and really bad at product. The ones who fill in the product experience as best they can are the companies that are trying to get paying customers, because those customers won't stand for a weird experience, regardless of the technical/governmental reasons
  - magpi3 8y ago
    The open source model expects apps to be open source. And if they are then an app can be recompiled to support new library versions. It is the hybrid open source library / closed source app that causes problems like this.
    - wolfgke 8y ago
      > It is the hybrid open source library / closed source app that causes problems like this. There can exist good reasons to deliver the application as binary even though it is open-source. The difference rather is: Microsoft cares about binary compatibility while the developers of userland libraries on GNU/Linux do not.
      - JetSpiegel 8y ago
        Most distros are distributed as binaries. But since the source is available and the licenses allow distribution, it's much easier to just recompile the thing. Binary compatibility is not valued if you can just recompile the source. Why waste brain cells maintaining compatibilty when the compiler can bake you a new compatible binary?
        badsectoracula 8y ago
        Because your users might be actually using more software than what you deem worthy to put in your distribution.
jacoblambda 8y ago
Basically, it's a matter of being able to force the issue. Distros are largely volunteer effort and are already a lot of work. Forcing library devs to cooperate would be a gargantuan task and just rejecting the changes would kill most distros (basically no libraries do this). Instead the distro devs just try to fix the compatibility problems themselves but they occasionally miss stuff.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  The only reason there are so many distros is because of how ridiculously complicated it is to build a functional Linux Desktop from the component software. If Linux were a more stable platform, you wouldn't need distros (or package managers for that matter).
  - jacoblambda 8y ago
    Welp this is where the issue and the meme is. This is where the Stallman rant: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html came from and is still a point of contention. The linux kernel is the only standard part of any distro. Anything beyond that is optional however it will most likely be GNU coreutils. Even then it may not be standard as coreutils may be replaced by busybox or BSD utils or any other core Unix utilities package. So that's what we are left with. Linux is not an operating system. GNU/Linux is, Busybox/Linux is, and all the distros are operating systems but Linux is not. people just like to clump all these different operating systems together and pretend that they are different versions of the same OS. If you want a "Linux" operating system that is well defined, look for the ones without Linux in the name. The BSDs have actual UNIX support (i.e. a standard library of tools) and Guix is a Unix-like/Linux-like that focuses on reproducibility and dependence stability.

majewsky 8y ago

> Doesn't Linux then choose a weird place to put the border between "OS" and "userspace"? Your fallacy is assuming that "Linux" is a single entity with a single mind. Linus is very strict about backwards compatibility, but he only controls the kernel, not glibc or Mesa or KDE.

kkarakk 8y ago
there's a reason people don't use linux outside of the server space and most of it is every piece of weirdness introduced above linus. the more esoteric your linux flavor(and closer to bare metal it is), the better your linux experience long term.
- sascha_sl 8y ago
  A dependency is a dependency. The distro does not matter. It matters what the game depends on and what the distro ships. Or, you know, snaps and appimage and flatpack. Where your only hard dependency becomes Linux. Which doesn't break userspace. Some early linux games made the mistake of using low level graphics libraries (not one of the opengl levels), these might not work because the newest drivers just don't support it.
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    To the end user none of that matters, all they know is that this thing does not "just work". windows and macos has that, no flavor of linux does(currently). i look forward to the snap/appimage/flatpack war, it's long overdue
    - dwighttk 8y ago
      Eh, macOS breaks old apps like it makes Apple money.
      - chronogram 8y ago
        Like Aperture from what.. 2014? Won’t run on the next macOS.. that’s an Apple application that can’t last more than a few years on an Apple system. Even Linux desktops are better than that, but not much better. They seem so emotional.
      - badsectoracula 8y ago
        And that was for me the main reason i stopped using macOS, as every new version of the operating system made software i had paid money for stop working - to the point that nothing works now.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Except that Snaps and Flatpack are over-engineered inflexible garbage compared to how this is handled in sane environments. Flatpack can't even handle the concept of installing to different media without building a brand new repository on it FFS (I don't know if this is true of Snap because it is far too Canonical-centric for my tastes). There's no reason it has to be like this. Even AppImage is slightly over-engineered in my opinion, but otherwise the only real failing of it is that since there's no standard for ELF embedded icons (wtf is wrong with UNIX devs!?) it's a shit-show to get them to show up as anything other than a generic one. This isn't hard, Linux people. Just standardize on a set of core libraries and stop breaking ABI outside of major versions, then you'll magically have this thing we call a "platform" upon which applications can run without being recompiled.
DannyBee 8y ago
Sure, but that just means a failure of Linux as a product experience. Users don't make that distinction, even a little bit. This is also arguably a failure of the open source model in practice (though not in theory). It tends to generate projects that are really good at infrastructure and really bad at product. The ones who fill in the product experience as best they can are the companies that are trying to get paying customers, because those customers won't stand for a weird experience, regardless of the technical/governmental reasons
- magpi3 8y ago
  The open source model expects apps to be open source. And if they are then an app can be recompiled to support new library versions. It is the hybrid open source library / closed source app that causes problems like this.
  - wolfgke 8y ago
    > It is the hybrid open source library / closed source app that causes problems like this. There can exist good reasons to deliver the application as binary even though it is open-source. The difference rather is: Microsoft cares about binary compatibility while the developers of userland libraries on GNU/Linux do not.
    - JetSpiegel 8y ago
      Most distros are distributed as binaries. But since the source is available and the licenses allow distribution, it's much easier to just recompile the thing. Binary compatibility is not valued if you can just recompile the source. Why waste brain cells maintaining compatibilty when the compiler can bake you a new compatible binary?
      - badsectoracula 8y ago
        Because your users might be actually using more software than what you deem worthy to put in your distribution.

jacoblambda 8y ago

Basically, it's a matter of being able to force the issue. Distros are largely volunteer effort and are already a lot of work. Forcing library devs to cooperate would be a gargantuan task and just rejecting the changes would kill most distros (basically no libraries do this). Instead the distro devs just try to fix the compatibility problems themselves but they occasionally miss stuff.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
The only reason there are so many distros is because of how ridiculously complicated it is to build a functional Linux Desktop from the component software. If Linux were a more stable platform, you wouldn't need distros (or package managers for that matter).
- jacoblambda 8y ago
  Welp this is where the issue and the meme is. This is where the Stallman rant: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html came from and is still a point of contention. The linux kernel is the only standard part of any distro. Anything beyond that is optional however it will most likely be GNU coreutils. Even then it may not be standard as coreutils may be replaced by busybox or BSD utils or any other core Unix utilities package. So that's what we are left with. Linux is not an operating system. GNU/Linux is, Busybox/Linux is, and all the distros are operating systems but Linux is not. people just like to clump all these different operating systems together and pretend that they are different versions of the same OS. If you want a "Linux" operating system that is well defined, look for the ones without Linux in the name. The BSDs have actual UNIX support (i.e. a standard library of tools) and Guix is a Unix-like/Linux-like that focuses on reproducibility and dependence stability.