Comment by Joker_vD
1 day ago
Why, again, software in the Linux world has to be packaged for multiple distributions? On the Windows side, if you make installer for Windows 7, it will still work on Windows 11. And to the boot, you don't have to go through some Microsoft-approved package distibution platform and its approval process: you can, of course, but you don't have to, you can distribute your software by yourself.
As michaelmior has already noted, Linux is not an OS. Anyone is free to take the sources and do as they wish (modulo GPL), which is what a lot of people did. Those people owe you nothing.
But consider FreeBSD. Contrary to Linux, it is a full, standalone operating system, just like Windows or macOS. It has pretty decent compatibility guarantees for each major release (~5 years of support). It also has an even more liberal license (it boils down to "do as you wish but give us credit").
Consider macOS. Apple keeps supporting 7yro hardware with new releases, and even after that keeps the security patches flowing for a while. Yet still, they regularly cull backwards compatibility to keep moving forward (e.g. ending support for 32-bit Intel executables to pave the way for Arm64).
Windows is the outlier here. Microsoft is putting insane amounts of effort into maintaining backwards compatibility, and they are able to do so only because of their unique market position.
> Why, again, software in the Linux world has to be packaged for multiple distributions?
Because a different distribution is a different operating system. Of course, not all distributions are completely different and you don't necessarily need to make a package for any particular distribution at all. Loads of software runs just fine being extracted into a directory somewhere. That said, you absolutely can use packages for older versions of a distribution in later versions of the same distribution in many cases, same as with Windows.
> And to the boot, you don't have to go through some Microsoft-approved package distribution platform and its approval process: you can, of course, but you don't have to, you can distribute your software by yourself.
This is the same with any Linux distribution I've ever used. It would be a lot of work for a Linux distribution to force you to use some approved distribution platform even if it wanted to.
> On the Windows side, if you make installer for Windows 7, it will still work on Windows 11.
Do you speak from experience or from anecdotes ?