7 ms·

I agree 100% with Linus. I can run a WinXP exe on Win10 or 11 almost every time, but on Linux I often have to chase down versions that still work with the lates

by kwanbix 10mo ago

I agree 100% with Linus. I can run a WinXP exe on Win10 or 11 almost every time, but on Linux I often have to chase down versions that still work with the latest Mint or Ubuntu distros. Stuff that worked before just breaks, especially if the app isn’t in the repo.

kccqzy 10mo ago
That’s actually an intentional nudge to make the software packaged by the distro, which usually implies that they are open source. Who needs ABI compatibility when your software is OSS? You only need API compatibility at that point.
- SkiFire13 10mo ago
  Everyone is mentioning ABI, but this is really an API problem, so "you only need API compatibility at that point" is a very big understatement.
- rep_lodsb 10mo ago
  So every Linux distribution should compile and distribute packages for every single piece of open source software in existence, both the very newest stuff that was only released last week, and also everything from 30+ years ago, no matter how obscure. Because almost certainly someone out there will want to use it. And they should be able to, because that is the entire point of free software: user freedom.
  - realusername 10mo ago
    Not sure if it's the right solution but it's a description of what happens right now in practice yes.
    - bruce511 10mo ago
      It also makes support more or less impossible. Even if we ship as source, even if the user has the skills to build it, even if the make file supports every version of the kernel, plus all other material variety, plus who knows how many dependencies, what exactly am I supposed to do when a user reports; "I followed your instructions and it doesn't run". Linux Desktop fails because it's not 1 thing, it's 100 things. And to get anything to run reliably on 95 of them you need to be extremely competent. Distribution as source fails because there are too many unknown, and dependent parts. Distribution as binary containers (Docker et al) are popular because it gives the app a fighting chance. While at the same time being a really ugly hack.
      - josephg 10mo ago
        Yep. But docker doesn’t help you with desktop apps. And everything becomes so big! I think Rob pike has the right idea with go just statically link everything wherever possible. These days I try to do the same, because so much less can go wrong for users. People don’t seem to mind downloading a 30mb executable, so long as it actually works.
        kccqzy 10mo ago
        What do you mean docker doesn’t help you with desktop apps? I run complicated desktop apps like Firefox inside containers all the time. There are also apps like Citrix Workspace that need so specific dependency versions that I’ve given up on running outside containers. If you don’t want to configure this manually, use distrobox, which is a nice shell script wrapper that helps you set things up so graphical desktop apps just work.
      - tuna74 10mo ago
        Then you only support 1 distro. If anyone wants to use your software on an unsupported distro they can figure out the rest themselves.
        well_ackshually 10mo ago
        No, they come online and whine that you didn't package your software for <obscure distro>, that your software is shit and you're incompetent.
      - immibis 10mo ago
        And being 100 things is completely unavoidable when freedom is involved. You can force everyone to use the same 1 thing, if you make it proprietary. If people have freedom to customize it, of course another 99 people will come along and do that. We should probably just accept this is the price of freedom. It's not as bad as it seems because you also have the freedom to make your system present like some other system in order to run programs made for that system.
  - kwanbix 10mo ago
    I am not an expert on this, but my question is, how does windows manages to achieve it? Why can't Linux do the same?
    - johnny22 10mo ago
      because they care about ABI/API stability.
      - nineteen999 10mo ago
        And have an ever decreasing market share, in desktop, hypervisor and server space. The API/ABI stability is probably the only thing stemming the customer leakage at all. It's not the be all and end all.
        ogogmad 10mo ago
        Decreasing market share in the desktop?
        immibis 10mo ago
        Yes, but Windows is even so bad, it's been decreasing market share of desktops.
  - kccqzy 10mo ago
    Your tone makes it sound like this is a bad thing. But from a user’s perspective, I do want a distro to package as much software as possible. And it has nothing to do with user freedom. It’s all about being entitled as a user to have the world’s software conveniently packaged.
    - Rohansi 10mo ago
      Software installed from your package manager is almost certainly provided as a binary already. You could package a .exe file and that should work everywhere WINE is installed.
      - kccqzy 10mo ago
        That's not my point. My point is that if executable A depends on library B, and library B does not provide any stable ABI, then the package manager will take care of updating A whenever updating B. Windows has fanatical commitment to ABI stability, so the situation above does not even occur. As a user, all the hard work dealing with ABI breakages on Linux are done by the people managing the software repos, not by the user or by the developer. I'm personally very appreciative of this fact.
        Rohansi 10mo ago
        Sure, it's better than nothing, but it's certainly not ideal. How much time and energy is being wasted by libraries like that? Wouldn't it be better if library B had a stable ABI or was versioned? Is there any reason it needs to work like this?
        kccqzy 10mo ago
        And you can also argue how much time and energy is being wasted by committing to a stable ABI such that the library cannot meaningfully improve. Remember that even struct sizes are part of the ABI; so you either cannot add new fields to a struct, or you expose pointers only and have to resort to dynamic allocation rather than stack allocation most of the time. Opinions could differ but personally I think a stable ABI wastes more time and energy than an unstable ABI because it forces code to be inefficient. Code is run more often than they are compiled. It’s better to allow code to run faster than to avoid extra compilations.
  - rixed 10mo ago
    Those users will either check the source code and compile it themself, with all the proper options to match their system; or rely on a software distribution to do it for them. People who are complaining would prefer a world of isolated apps downloaded from signed stores, but Linux was born at an optimistic time when the goal was software that cooperate and form a system, and which distribution does not depend on a central trusted platform. I do not believe that there is any real technical issue discussed here, just drastically different goals.
    - ogogmad 10mo ago
      No. People would prefer the equivalent of double-click `setup.exe`. Were you being serious?
  - anthk 10mo ago
    That's Guix.
- johncolanduoni 10mo ago
  Even open-source software has to deal with the moving target that is ABI and API compatibility on Linux. OpenSSL’s API versioning is a nightmare, for example, and it’s the most critical piece of software to dynamically link (and almost everything needs a crypto/SSL library). Stable ABIs for certain critical pieces of independently-updatable software (libc, OpenSSL, etc.) is not even that big of a lift or a hard tradeoff. I’ve never run into any issues with macOS’s libc because it doesn’t version the symbol for fopen like glibc does. It just requires commitment and forethought.
- cryptonector 10mo ago
  The reason you're getting downvoted is that what you're saying implies a shit-ton of work for the distros -- that's expensive work that someone has to pay for (but nobody wants to, and think of the cost of opportunity). But you're not entirely wrong -- as long as you have API compatibility then it's just a rebuild, right? Well, no, because something always breaks and requires attention. The fact is that in the world of open source the devs/maintainers can't be as disciplined about API compat as you want them to be, and sometimes they have to break backwards compatibility for reasons (security, or just too much tech debt and maint load for obsolete APIs). Because every upstream evolves at a different rate, keeping a distro updated is just hard. I'm not saying that statically linking things and continuing to run the binaries for decades is a good answer though. I'm merely explaining why I think your comment got downvoted.
SvenL 10mo ago
Yes and even the package format thing is a hell of its own. Even on Ubuntu you have multiple package formats and sometimes there are even multiple app stores (a Gnome one and an Ubuntu specific if I remember correctly)
- mikestorrent 10mo ago
  Ultimately this boils down to lack of clear technical and community leadership from Canonical. Too unwilling to say "no" to vanity/pet projects that end up costing all of us as they make the resulting distribution into a moving target too difficult to support in the enterprise - at least, not with the skillset of the average desktop support hire these days. I want to go to the alternate timeline where they just stuck with a set of technologies... ideally KDE... and just matured them up until they were the idealized version of their original plan instead of always throwing things away to rewrite them for ideological or technical purity of design.
Propelloni 10mo ago
You can also run a WinXP exe on any Linux distribution almost every time. That's the point of project and Linus' quip: The only stable ABI around on MS Windows and Linux is Win32 (BTW, I do not agree with this.)
- Negitivefrags 10mo ago
  I think it's not unlikely that we reach reach a point in a couple of decades where we are all developing win32 apps that most people are running some form of linux. We already have an entire platform like that (steam deck), and it's the best linux development experience around in my opinion.

by kwanbix 10mo ago

kccqzy 10mo ago

That’s actually an intentional nudge to make the software packaged by the distro, which usually implies that they are open source. Who needs ABI compatibility when your software is OSS? You only need API compatibility at that point.

SkiFire13 10mo ago
Everyone is mentioning ABI, but this is really an API problem, so "you only need API compatibility at that point" is a very big understatement.
rep_lodsb 10mo ago
So every Linux distribution should compile and distribute packages for every single piece of open source software in existence, both the very newest stuff that was only released last week, and also everything from 30+ years ago, no matter how obscure. Because almost certainly someone out there will want to use it. And they should be able to, because that is the entire point of free software: user freedom.
- realusername 10mo ago
  Not sure if it's the right solution but it's a description of what happens right now in practice yes.
  - bruce511 10mo ago
    It also makes support more or less impossible. Even if we ship as source, even if the user has the skills to build it, even if the make file supports every version of the kernel, plus all other material variety, plus who knows how many dependencies, what exactly am I supposed to do when a user reports; "I followed your instructions and it doesn't run". Linux Desktop fails because it's not 1 thing, it's 100 things. And to get anything to run reliably on 95 of them you need to be extremely competent. Distribution as source fails because there are too many unknown, and dependent parts. Distribution as binary containers (Docker et al) are popular because it gives the app a fighting chance. While at the same time being a really ugly hack.
    - josephg 10mo ago
      Yep. But docker doesn’t help you with desktop apps. And everything becomes so big! I think Rob pike has the right idea with go just statically link everything wherever possible. These days I try to do the same, because so much less can go wrong for users. People don’t seem to mind downloading a 30mb executable, so long as it actually works.
      - kccqzy 10mo ago
        What do you mean docker doesn’t help you with desktop apps? I run complicated desktop apps like Firefox inside containers all the time. There are also apps like Citrix Workspace that need so specific dependency versions that I’ve given up on running outside containers. If you don’t want to configure this manually, use distrobox, which is a nice shell script wrapper that helps you set things up so graphical desktop apps just work.
    - tuna74 10mo ago
      Then you only support 1 distro. If anyone wants to use your software on an unsupported distro they can figure out the rest themselves.
      - well_ackshually 10mo ago
        No, they come online and whine that you didn't package your software for <obscure distro>, that your software is shit and you're incompetent.
    - immibis 10mo ago
      And being 100 things is completely unavoidable when freedom is involved. You can force everyone to use the same 1 thing, if you make it proprietary. If people have freedom to customize it, of course another 99 people will come along and do that. We should probably just accept this is the price of freedom. It's not as bad as it seems because you also have the freedom to make your system present like some other system in order to run programs made for that system.
- kwanbix 10mo ago
  I am not an expert on this, but my question is, how does windows manages to achieve it? Why can't Linux do the same?
  - johnny22 10mo ago
    because they care about ABI/API stability.
    - nineteen999 10mo ago
      And have an ever decreasing market share, in desktop, hypervisor and server space. The API/ABI stability is probably the only thing stemming the customer leakage at all. It's not the be all and end all.
      - ogogmad 10mo ago
        Decreasing market share in the desktop?
        immibis 10mo ago
        Yes, but Windows is even so bad, it's been decreasing market share of desktops.
- kccqzy 10mo ago
  Your tone makes it sound like this is a bad thing. But from a user’s perspective, I do want a distro to package as much software as possible. And it has nothing to do with user freedom. It’s all about being entitled as a user to have the world’s software conveniently packaged.
  - Rohansi 10mo ago
    Software installed from your package manager is almost certainly provided as a binary already. You could package a .exe file and that should work everywhere WINE is installed.
    - kccqzy 10mo ago
      That's not my point. My point is that if executable A depends on library B, and library B does not provide any stable ABI, then the package manager will take care of updating A whenever updating B. Windows has fanatical commitment to ABI stability, so the situation above does not even occur. As a user, all the hard work dealing with ABI breakages on Linux are done by the people managing the software repos, not by the user or by the developer. I'm personally very appreciative of this fact.
      - Rohansi 10mo ago
        Sure, it's better than nothing, but it's certainly not ideal. How much time and energy is being wasted by libraries like that? Wouldn't it be better if library B had a stable ABI or was versioned? Is there any reason it needs to work like this?
        kccqzy 10mo ago
        And you can also argue how much time and energy is being wasted by committing to a stable ABI such that the library cannot meaningfully improve. Remember that even struct sizes are part of the ABI; so you either cannot add new fields to a struct, or you expose pointers only and have to resort to dynamic allocation rather than stack allocation most of the time. Opinions could differ but personally I think a stable ABI wastes more time and energy than an unstable ABI because it forces code to be inefficient. Code is run more often than they are compiled. It’s better to allow code to run faster than to avoid extra compilations.
- rixed 10mo ago
  Those users will either check the source code and compile it themself, with all the proper options to match their system; or rely on a software distribution to do it for them. People who are complaining would prefer a world of isolated apps downloaded from signed stores, but Linux was born at an optimistic time when the goal was software that cooperate and form a system, and which distribution does not depend on a central trusted platform. I do not believe that there is any real technical issue discussed here, just drastically different goals.
  - ogogmad 10mo ago
    No. People would prefer the equivalent of double-click `setup.exe`. Were you being serious?
- anthk 10mo ago
  That's Guix.
johncolanduoni 10mo ago
Even open-source software has to deal with the moving target that is ABI and API compatibility on Linux. OpenSSL’s API versioning is a nightmare, for example, and it’s the most critical piece of software to dynamically link (and almost everything needs a crypto/SSL library). Stable ABIs for certain critical pieces of independently-updatable software (libc, OpenSSL, etc.) is not even that big of a lift or a hard tradeoff. I’ve never run into any issues with macOS’s libc because it doesn’t version the symbol for fopen like glibc does. It just requires commitment and forethought.
cryptonector 10mo ago
The reason you're getting downvoted is that what you're saying implies a shit-ton of work for the distros -- that's expensive work that someone has to pay for (but nobody wants to, and think of the cost of opportunity). But you're not entirely wrong -- as long as you have API compatibility then it's just a rebuild, right? Well, no, because something always breaks and requires attention. The fact is that in the world of open source the devs/maintainers can't be as disciplined about API compat as you want them to be, and sometimes they have to break backwards compatibility for reasons (security, or just too much tech debt and maint load for obsolete APIs). Because every upstream evolves at a different rate, keeping a distro updated is just hard. I'm not saying that statically linking things and continuing to run the binaries for decades is a good answer though. I'm merely explaining why I think your comment got downvoted.

SvenL 10mo ago

Yes and even the package format thing is a hell of its own. Even on Ubuntu you have multiple package formats and sometimes there are even multiple app stores (a Gnome one and an Ubuntu specific if I remember correctly)

mikestorrent 10mo ago
Ultimately this boils down to lack of clear technical and community leadership from Canonical. Too unwilling to say "no" to vanity/pet projects that end up costing all of us as they make the resulting distribution into a moving target too difficult to support in the enterprise - at least, not with the skillset of the average desktop support hire these days. I want to go to the alternate timeline where they just stuck with a set of technologies... ideally KDE... and just matured them up until they were the idealized version of their original plan instead of always throwing things away to rewrite them for ideological or technical purity of design.

Propelloni 10mo ago

You can also run a WinXP exe on any Linux distribution almost every time. That's the point of project and Linus' quip: The only stable ABI around on MS Windows and Linux is Win32 (BTW, I do not agree with this.)

Negitivefrags 10mo ago
I think it's not unlikely that we reach reach a point in a couple of decades where we are all developing win32 apps that most people are running some form of linux. We already have an entire platform like that (steam deck), and it's the best linux development experience around in my opinion.