this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Could you clarify what you mean with this?
Not the person you're replying to, but Linux has long had a policy of "F backwards compatibility" in the userspace. Try running a 10 year old binary on the current version of a distro. Try a 5 year old binary. Chances are, it's not going to work, or you're going to go through dependency hell trying to get the correct library versions for that old binary.
But notice how Windows 11 can run a Windows XP app.
That's the problem. Most users aren't going to want to compile from source, assuming the software they're trying to use is even open source. Hell, nvidia users constantly have driver issues because the binary blobs must be updated to continue working after kernel updates. And that's not to mention all the competing package managers and distro quirks with library versions and naming.
You can run 16 bit Windows 3.0 apps on Windows 10 on compatible hardware. Can I run any Linux application compiled 20+ years ago on any modern distro without any fuckery? No. I can't even run apps compiled for the latest Arch on the latest Ubuntu, lol. Software development for Linux is a total nightmare.