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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
by jacoblambda 7y 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 7y agoThe 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 7y agoWelp 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.