> But in contrast, Linus has kept his "don't break userspace" promise damned near perfectly. Yes, because Linus gets it. The people behind the userspace of des

> But in contrast, Linus has kept his "don't break userspace" promise damned near perfectly. Yes, because Linus gets it. The people behind the userspace of desktop Linux really really don't though. If I want to write a Linux program that will work in 20 years without recompilation I can only depend on the kernel. Case in point: > download Debian potato (circa 2000) and expand to a directory on machine running the latest Linux 64 (potato is 32 bit only), chrooted into it, apt install whatever, and showed him it all just works. You basically had to swap out the entire userspace to do that because ABI compatibility outside of the kernel is practically nonexistant.