I think the GUI applications thing is another of those times where it's a tradeoff. Much like the way drivers work, it's fair to be annoyed with it, but it repl

I think the GUI applications thing is another of those times where it's a tradeoff. Much like the way drivers work, it's fair to be annoyed with it, but it replaces (more or less equally) annoyances in Windows's opposite approach. Yes, your usual desktop Linux distro doesn't expect you to be running a GTK application that was built twenty years ago. If you do that, you probably need to do some manual steps. (That's why it installs to ~2 GB). On the other hand, GNOME uses one version of one UI toolkit across all of its core applications. If you click through the Settings application, you will not - at any point - come across a control panel from 1995. Meanwhile, want to make a native app for GNOME? Great, you have one option[1]. The lack of screwing around with backwards compatibility - freely dropping stuff when it isn't useful anymore - makes for a thinner, tidier stack in a lot of ways. It's better if we can have both - obviously it sucks knowing you'll have to "fix" something eventually because Lenart invented a newer better duotronic transporter buffer - and maybe stuff like flatpak will be able to help with that in the future, but I for one am grateful desktop Linux isn't forced to drag around a mountain of shims and forgotten libraries for a minority of users. [1] https://developer.gnome.org/ https://developer.gnome.org/