> He started saying that syscalls are stable and that it's a gtk/GUI library problem and that if you were to, say, if you somehow loaded all the old libraries,

> He started saying that syscalls are stable and that it's a gtk/GUI library problem and that if you were to, say, if you somehow loaded all the old libraries, it would work. That's because no single organization can be blamed for the mess that is "GNU/Linux" ;-) Binary compatibility is very important for the kernel folks, but apparently much less so for maintainers of glibc and other libraries. As a workaround, binaries can be statically compiled, or bundled with all their dependencies. Flatpak and Snappy are two projects addressing this issue by packaging applications as containers.