Comment by sgt

4 hours ago

Biggest problem with Linux apps - i.e. distributed with ease the way that Windows and macOS apps are distributed, is the lack of a stable ABI. If you asked me about this 20 years ago I'd say in 2026 there'd for sure be a stable ABI, but no.

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sgt

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seabrookmx  3 hours ago

Everyone parrots this but I don't think it's true. The Linux kernel does famously have a stable ABI (we "don't break user space" after all).

The issue is folks expect this to be at a higher level, so when libc or GTK or Qt etc. have breaking changes, all your apps using the old versions fail. This is a legitimate pain point with traditional distros.. I don't want to sound like I'm downplaying it.

However, this is basically solved by flatpak (and others like it, eg snap) which contain _all_ these dependencies in the package. Layering (ala containers) is used for deduplication so you don't have 20 copies of a given GTK version.

While MacOS provides the windowing toolkit etc. at the OS level, it's otherwise similar to how a .app file works. Installers aren't dropping dynamic libraries and resource files all over your disk, the app is "self-contained."

WD-42  3 hours ago

This isn’t an issue in practice because the software running on Linux is open source. Yes if you want to distribute proprietary binary blobs and have them work forever it’s going to be a challenge, but in that case better to stick with the binary blob operating system.

  • sgt  1 hour ago

    There's plenty of software running on Linux that is not open source, though.

    • WD-42  41 minutes ago

      Such as?

      The only proprietary software I have running on my machine is electron apps, which are essentially bloated VMs. As we’ve seen from this thread, this is still apparently too great of an engineering feat for anthropic to tackle. I don’t think I’m unique in this regard.