The reason this is a problem is that devs think they need to save 10MB of RAM by dynamically linking libc instead of statically compiling it or just including the blob with the game.
Puritans on Linux are a real menace. Every time someone calls an OS install image of 3-4gb “bloated” I want to scream uncontrollably. Not statically linking stuff is part of this cultural issue.
Flatpak might solves these issues in the long run. Of course the same people therefore hate it, because it’s “bloated” and “convoluted”.
<rant>
How dare we have different versions of the same lib! Where will we end up, like MS Windows? Where I can boot up apps as old as myself? Outrageous! Not my precious mibibytes!).
</rant>
The core principal of GNU from which every other principal is derived is “I shouldn’t need an ancient unmaintained printer driver that only works on windows 95 to use my god damned printer. I should have the source code so I can adapt it to work with my smart toaster”
If an app is open source then I’ve almost never encountered a situation where I can’t build a working version. Its happened to me once that I remember. A synthesia clone called linthesia. Would not compile for love nor money and the provided binary was built for ubuntu 12 or something.
Linux was probably ready for the 64-bit appocalypse even before Apple for this exact reason. Anything open source will just run, on anything, because some hobbiest has wanted to use it on their favourite platform at some point. And if not, you’d be surprised how not hard it is to checkout the sourcecode from github and make your own port. Difficult, but far from impossible.
Steam games do not distribute source code, which means they break, and when they break the community can’t fix them. They can’t statically link glibc because that would put them in violation of the GPL (as far as I’m aware anyway). They are fundamentally second class citizens on linux because they refuse to embrace its culture. FOSS apps basically never die while there’s someone to maintain them.
Its like when American companies come to Europe and realise the workers have rights and then get a reputation as scuzzballs for trying to rules lawyer those rights.
This shit is the exact reason Linux doesn’t just have ridiculously bad backwards compatibility but has also alienated literally everyone who isn’t a developer, and why the most stable ABI on Linux is god damn Win32 through Wine. Hell, for the same reason fundamentally important things like accessibility tools keep breaking, something where the only correct answer to is this blogpost. FOSS is awesome and all, but not if it demands from you to become a developer and continuesly invest hundreds of hours just so things won’t break. We should be able to habe both, free software AND good compatibility.
What you describe is in no way a strength, it’s Linux’ core problem. Something we have to overcome ASAP.
It isn’t a core problem, it’s a filter, and a damn good one. Keeps the bad behavior out of Linux. Thats why people keep turning to it for lack of enshittification. Stable ABIs are what lead to corpo-capital interests infecting every single piece of technology and chaining us to their systems via vendor lock-in.
I wish the Windows users who are sick of Windows would stop moving to Linux and trying to change it into Windows. Yes, move to Linux if you want, but use Linux.
This might be the most awful Linuxbro take I’ve read this year, congratulations. Linux has to lack a stable ABI to keep the capitalists away and make apps constantly require maintenance to filter out bad behaviour? Just wow.
I really hope for way more people to come over so nonsense like this finally stops.
No. Its not about driving away the capitalists. Its about forcing them to bend to the community. Its not “Linux has to lack a stable ABI to keep the capitalists away” its “Linux is not here to baby rich corporations and exempt them from rules that literally nobody including little timmy who’s 14 and just submitted his first PHP patch has a problem with”. This is developers who are used to living in houses trying to set up shop in an apartment complex and then finding out different rules apply and being colossal babies about it.
The point of the GNU foundation was to destroy the concept of closed source software. Which is a completely justified response to Xerox incorporated telling you your printer is no longer supported and you just have to buy a new one. Capitalists are welcome. Anti right to repair people can fuck right off and if we had the right to repair their software we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place because someone else would have already fixed it.
And that fight against closed-source and anti-consumer shit is awesome, but that changes absolutely nothing about Linux being completely awful in terms of long-term support. Running old software is a whole project (for enthusiasts) in itself almost every single time, meanwhile I can run almost any decade-old software on systems like Android or Windows simply by installing it without having to be an IT professional.
that literally nobody including little timmy who’s 14 and just submitted his first PHP patch has a problem with."
Except that this causes usability issues for the 99.99% of users who aren’t that little Timmy you just made up, and it causes accessibility tools which are freaking essential for many people to simply break. Old games becoming unplayable isn’t an issue only because of their Windows versions and Wine, dxvk etc - we literally have to fall back to Windows software to keep software running because of how badly the Linux system architecture works for desktop usage. What a disgrace.
if we had the right to repair their software we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place because someone else would have already fixed it.
Literally has nothing to do with Linux’ own problems.
Linux’s own problems is that we have a culture of “tear everything down and make way for progress”, which I personally approve of. However, things keep getting left behind in the rebuilding process and that’s a very real cultural problem. We should have been rebuilding those accessibility tools with everything else and the reason we haven’t is that quite frankly the linux community itself hates disabled people.
I see no other reason that disabled people would be relying on old and unmaintained code in the first place. That’s not a problem with the build and rebuild attitude, that’s a problem of who we accept into the community. Why is the only wheelchair accessible building 20 years old and full of rotting floorboards?
Linux is built by the community and always does what it thinks is best for the community. The fact that “what’s best” does not include maintaining the accessibility features is fucking deplorable and that’s a legitimate thing to complain about. But a system shouldn’t need to support legacy junk just to provide accesibility features that should have been core parts of the system from the beginning. In that, no linux developer has the right to look a microslop developer in the eye.
Android is Linux! You’re running your decades old software, on Linux. What was the last completely unmaintained binary that you pulled on Windows and ran (with no tweaking) and the last one that failed on Linux?
Have you considered joining the community and working with it – like the author of the blog that you keep sharing – instead of trying to insult every one who works on it and calling it a disgrace?
What, you don’t like role-playing software development & distribution as if we were still in the 90s?? 🥺🥺 /j
But srs, most of Linux’s biggest technical problems are either caused by cultural legacy or blocked by it.
The distribution model being one of the most pungent examples.
Fortunately we do have a steady influx of new people incl. those who demand shit to god damn work, finally shifting this notion.
For the time being we still have to resort to using the Windows version and Wine for old software though… But I already had the situation where the (unmaintained but working) app also had a Flatpak which was last updated many years ago and it just worked, which made me incredibly happy and hopeful. ❤️
Good thing there’s a battle-proven response if people don’t like this because it’s “not what Linux is supposed to be” or some other nonsense: If you don’t like it just fork it yourself. 😚
Fortunately we do have a steady influx of new people incl. those who demand shit to god damn work, finally shifting this notion.
What the hell is going on in this thread? Linux has been being actively developed by people who want “shit to god damn work” forever. What are the concrete examples of things that don’t work? Old games? Is that the problem here? These things that were developed for the locked in Windows ecosystem since time immemorial and never ran on Linux and now, through all of the work of the Linux ecosystem, do, by some miracle, run on Linux. It’s amazing that these things work at all: they were never intended to!
What the hell is going on in this thread? Linux has been being actively developed by people who want “shit to god damn work” forever.
Yes and no. Yes as in “you can fix it” (if you’re a programmer), but no in terms of “everything is set up so binaries will still run in 20 years as-is”. Dependency hell, missing library versions, binaries being linked against old glibc versions you can’t provide… all of these are known issues, and devs are often being discouraged from compiling tools in a way that makes them work forever (since that makes the app bigger and potentially consume more memory). And better don’t tell someone who’s blind (and used Linux before) what’s quoted above, they’ll either laugh at you or get really angry. It’s also one of the reasons I’m angry (I’m able to see, but I hate this hypocrisy in the community). Linux on desktop utterly alienated disabled people, simply because stuff like screenreaders keep breaking.
Running 20 year old binaries is not the primary use case and it is very manageable if you actually want to do that. I’ve been amazed at some completely ancient programs that I’ve been able to run, but I don’t see any reason a 20 year old binary should “just work”, that kind of support is a bit silly. Instead maybe we should encourage abandonware to not be abandonware? If you’re not going to support your project, and that project is important to people, provide the source. I don’t blame the Linux developers for that kind of thing at all.
devs are often being discouraged from compiling tools in a way that makes them work forever (since that makes the app bigger and potentially consume more memory)
This is simply not true. If you want your program to be a core part of a distribution, yes, you must follow that distribution’s packaging and linking guidelines: I’m not sure what else a dev would expect. There is no requirement that your program be part of a distribution’s core. Dynamic linking isn’t some huge burden holding everyone back and I have absolutely no idea why anyone would pretend it is. If you want to static link go for it? There is literally nothing stopping you.
Linux desktop isn’t actively working against disabled people, don’t be obtuse. There is so much work being done for literally no money by volunteers and they are unable to prioritize accessibility. That’s unfortunate but it’s not some sort of hypocritical alienation. That also has likely very little to do with the Linux kernel ABI stability like you claimed earlier.
But this idea that “finally we have people that want Linux to work” is infuriating. Do you have any idea how much of an uphill battle it has been to just get WiFi working on Linux? That isn’t because the volunteer community is lazy and doesn’t want things to work: that’s because literally every company is hostile to the open source community to the point of sometimes deliberately changing things just to screw us over. The entitlement in that statement is truly infuriating.
Running 20 year old binaries is not the primary use case and it is very manageable if you actually want to do that. I’ve been amazed at some completely ancient programs that I’ve been able to run, but I don’t see any reason a 20 year old binary should “just work”, that kind of support is a bit silly. Instead maybe we should encourage abandonware to not be abandonware? If you’re not going to support your project, and that project is important to people, provide the source. I don’t blame the Linux developers for that kind of thing at all.
I see your point. What I think though is that it’s particularly hard on Linux to fix programs, especially if you are not a developer (which is always the perspective I try to see things from). Most notable architectural difference here between f.e. Windows and Linux would be how you’re able to simply throw a library into the same folder as the executable on Windows for it to use it (an action every common user can do and fully understand). On Linux you hypothetically can work with LD_PRELOAD, but (assuming someone already wrote a tutorial and points to the file for you to grab) even that already requires more knowledge about some system concepts.
Of course software not becoming abandonware would be best, but that’s not really something we can expect to happen. Even if Europe would make the absolutely banger move and enforce open-sourcing upon abandonment of software after a few years, it would still require a developer to fix issues. The architecture of the OS should be set up so it’s as easy as possible to make something run, using concepts (like file management) as many people as possible are familiar with.
devs are often being discouraged from compiling tools in a way that makes them work forever (since that makes the app bigger and potentially consume more memory)
This is simply not true.
We might be in different bubbles in this case. Please be aware I’m talking about the very loud toxic minority (hopefully it’s a minority…) who constantly shit about how things aren’t following “KISS” close enough, that your app or distro is bloated, etc. It feels like if I was collecting all statements against Flatpak, systemd, even just static linking that boil down to “it’s bloated! It’s not KISS! Bad!” (so not well-reasoned criticism) I read or hear, including around my local hackspace or on events, I could fill whole books.
Linux desktop isn’t actively working against disabled people, don’t be obtuse.
Not actively, no. The issue here is rather that, for way too long, we didn’t care enough. We had things working comparatively nicely one or two decades ago, but in more recent history the support deteriorated to such a degree the Linux desktop has become, to a huge degree, inaccessible to blind people (mostly due to issues with Wayland). I didn’t save those blogposts or statements to show in discussions like these, but the takeaway from all of them is that “It used to work for me many years ago, but if I want a system that respects me today I’m forced to use Mac”. But of course you’re also right, it’s slowly getting better!
(Correct me if I’m wrong, not a native speaker: “being alienated” doesn’t inherently imply malicious intent of doing so, does it?)
But this idea that “finally we have people that want Linux to work” is infuriating. Do you have any idea how much of an uphill battle it has been to just get WiFi working on Linux? That isn’t because the volunteer community is lazy and doesn’t want things to work: that’s because literally every company is hostile to the open source community to the point of sometimes deliberately changing things just to screw us over. The entitlement in that statement is truly infuriating.
Sorry, I was really pissed off yesterday evening by earlier comments in the chain implying it’s good to “filter out people” and got carried away. This one is completely on me.
The reason this is a problem is that devs think they need to save 10MB of RAM by dynamically linking libc instead of statically compiling it or just including the blob with the game.
Puritans on Linux are a real menace. Every time someone calls an OS install image of 3-4gb “bloated” I want to scream uncontrollably. Not statically linking stuff is part of this cultural issue.
Flatpak might solves these issues in the long run. Of course the same people therefore hate it, because it’s “bloated” and “convoluted”.
<rant> How dare we have different versions of the same lib! Where will we end up, like MS Windows? Where I can boot up apps as old as myself? Outrageous! Not my precious mibibytes!). </rant>
The core principal of GNU from which every other principal is derived is “I shouldn’t need an ancient unmaintained printer driver that only works on windows 95 to use my god damned printer. I should have the source code so I can adapt it to work with my smart toaster”
If an app is open source then I’ve almost never encountered a situation where I can’t build a working version. Its happened to me once that I remember. A synthesia clone called linthesia. Would not compile for love nor money and the provided binary was built for ubuntu 12 or something.
Linux was probably ready for the 64-bit appocalypse even before Apple for this exact reason. Anything open source will just run, on anything, because some hobbiest has wanted to use it on their favourite platform at some point. And if not, you’d be surprised how not hard it is to checkout the sourcecode from github and make your own port. Difficult, but far from impossible.
Steam games do not distribute source code, which means they break, and when they break the community can’t fix them. They can’t statically link glibc because that would put them in violation of the GPL (as far as I’m aware anyway). They are fundamentally second class citizens on linux because they refuse to embrace its culture. FOSS apps basically never die while there’s someone to maintain them.
Its like when American companies come to Europe and realise the workers have rights and then get a reputation as scuzzballs for trying to rules lawyer those rights.
This shit is the exact reason Linux doesn’t just have ridiculously bad backwards compatibility but has also alienated literally everyone who isn’t a developer, and why the most stable ABI on Linux is god damn Win32 through Wine. Hell, for the same reason fundamentally important things like accessibility tools keep breaking, something where the only correct answer to is this blogpost. FOSS is awesome and all, but not if it demands from you to become a developer and continuesly invest hundreds of hours just so things won’t break. We should be able to habe both, free software AND good compatibility.
What you describe is in no way a strength, it’s Linux’ core problem. Something we have to overcome ASAP.
It isn’t a core problem, it’s a filter, and a damn good one. Keeps the bad behavior out of Linux. Thats why people keep turning to it for lack of enshittification. Stable ABIs are what lead to corpo-capital interests infecting every single piece of technology and chaining us to their systems via vendor lock-in.
I wish the Windows users who are sick of Windows would stop moving to Linux and trying to change it into Windows. Yes, move to Linux if you want, but use Linux.
This might be the most awful Linuxbro take I’ve read this year, congratulations. Linux has to lack a stable ABI to keep the capitalists away and make apps constantly require maintenance to filter out bad behaviour? Just wow.
I really hope for way more people to come over so nonsense like this finally stops.
No. Its not about driving away the capitalists. Its about forcing them to bend to the community. Its not “Linux has to lack a stable ABI to keep the capitalists away” its “Linux is not here to baby rich corporations and exempt them from rules that literally nobody including little timmy who’s 14 and just submitted his first PHP patch has a problem with”. This is developers who are used to living in houses trying to set up shop in an apartment complex and then finding out different rules apply and being colossal babies about it.
The point of the GNU foundation was to destroy the concept of closed source software. Which is a completely justified response to Xerox incorporated telling you your printer is no longer supported and you just have to buy a new one. Capitalists are welcome. Anti right to repair people can fuck right off and if we had the right to repair their software we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place because someone else would have already fixed it.
And that fight against closed-source and anti-consumer shit is awesome, but that changes absolutely nothing about Linux being completely awful in terms of long-term support. Running old software is a whole project (for enthusiasts) in itself almost every single time, meanwhile I can run almost any decade-old software on systems like Android or Windows simply by installing it without having to be an IT professional.
Except that this causes usability issues for the 99.99% of users who aren’t that little Timmy you just made up, and it causes accessibility tools which are freaking essential for many people to simply break. Old games becoming unplayable isn’t an issue only because of their Windows versions and Wine, dxvk etc - we literally have to fall back to Windows software to keep software running because of how badly the Linux system architecture works for desktop usage. What a disgrace.
Literally has nothing to do with Linux’ own problems.
Linux’s own problems is that we have a culture of “tear everything down and make way for progress”, which I personally approve of. However, things keep getting left behind in the rebuilding process and that’s a very real cultural problem. We should have been rebuilding those accessibility tools with everything else and the reason we haven’t is that quite frankly the linux community itself hates disabled people.
I see no other reason that disabled people would be relying on old and unmaintained code in the first place. That’s not a problem with the build and rebuild attitude, that’s a problem of who we accept into the community. Why is the only wheelchair accessible building 20 years old and full of rotting floorboards?
Linux is built by the community and always does what it thinks is best for the community. The fact that “what’s best” does not include maintaining the accessibility features is fucking deplorable and that’s a legitimate thing to complain about. But a system shouldn’t need to support legacy junk just to provide accesibility features that should have been core parts of the system from the beginning. In that, no linux developer has the right to look a microslop developer in the eye.
Android is Linux! You’re running your decades old software, on Linux. What was the last completely unmaintained binary that you pulled on Windows and ran (with no tweaking) and the last one that failed on Linux?
Why do you keep sharing that link instead of this one? https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love-me-back-post-4-wayland-is-growing-up-and-now-we-dont-have-a-choice/ The one where the same person you’ve been posting says clearly people are working on accessibility and things are improving?
Have you considered joining the community and working with it – like the author of the blog that you keep sharing – instead of trying to insult every one who works on it and calling it a disgrace?
What, you don’t like role-playing software development & distribution as if we were still in the 90s?? 🥺🥺 /j
But srs, most of Linux’s biggest technical problems are either caused by cultural legacy or blocked by it. The distribution model being one of the most pungent examples.
Fortunately we do have a steady influx of new people incl. those who demand shit to god damn work, finally shifting this notion.
For the time being we still have to resort to using the Windows version and Wine for old software though… But I already had the situation where the (unmaintained but working) app also had a Flatpak which was last updated many years ago and it just worked, which made me incredibly happy and hopeful. ❤️
Good thing there’s a battle-proven response if people don’t like this because it’s “not what Linux is supposed to be” or some other nonsense: If you don’t like it just fork it yourself. 😚
What the hell is going on in this thread? Linux has been being actively developed by people who want “shit to god damn work” forever. What are the concrete examples of things that don’t work? Old games? Is that the problem here? These things that were developed for the locked in Windows ecosystem since time immemorial and never ran on Linux and now, through all of the work of the Linux ecosystem, do, by some miracle, run on Linux. It’s amazing that these things work at all: they were never intended to!
Yes and no. Yes as in “you can fix it” (if you’re a programmer), but no in terms of “everything is set up so binaries will still run in 20 years as-is”. Dependency hell, missing library versions, binaries being linked against old glibc versions you can’t provide… all of these are known issues, and devs are often being discouraged from compiling tools in a way that makes them work forever (since that makes the app bigger and potentially consume more memory). And better don’t tell someone who’s blind (and used Linux before) what’s quoted above, they’ll either laugh at you or get really angry. It’s also one of the reasons I’m angry (I’m able to see, but I hate this hypocrisy in the community). Linux on desktop utterly alienated disabled people, simply because stuff like screenreaders keep breaking.
Running 20 year old binaries is not the primary use case and it is very manageable if you actually want to do that. I’ve been amazed at some completely ancient programs that I’ve been able to run, but I don’t see any reason a 20 year old binary should “just work”, that kind of support is a bit silly. Instead maybe we should encourage abandonware to not be abandonware? If you’re not going to support your project, and that project is important to people, provide the source. I don’t blame the Linux developers for that kind of thing at all.
This is simply not true. If you want your program to be a core part of a distribution, yes, you must follow that distribution’s packaging and linking guidelines: I’m not sure what else a dev would expect. There is no requirement that your program be part of a distribution’s core. Dynamic linking isn’t some huge burden holding everyone back and I have absolutely no idea why anyone would pretend it is. If you want to static link go for it? There is literally nothing stopping you.
Linux desktop isn’t actively working against disabled people, don’t be obtuse. There is so much work being done for literally no money by volunteers and they are unable to prioritize accessibility. That’s unfortunate but it’s not some sort of hypocritical alienation. That also has likely very little to do with the Linux kernel ABI stability like you claimed earlier.
But this idea that “finally we have people that want Linux to work” is infuriating. Do you have any idea how much of an uphill battle it has been to just get WiFi working on Linux? That isn’t because the volunteer community is lazy and doesn’t want things to work: that’s because literally every company is hostile to the open source community to the point of sometimes deliberately changing things just to screw us over. The entitlement in that statement is truly infuriating.
I see your point. What I think though is that it’s particularly hard on Linux to fix programs, especially if you are not a developer (which is always the perspective I try to see things from). Most notable architectural difference here between f.e. Windows and Linux would be how you’re able to simply throw a library into the same folder as the executable on Windows for it to use it (an action every common user can do and fully understand). On Linux you hypothetically can work with LD_PRELOAD, but (assuming someone already wrote a tutorial and points to the file for you to grab) even that already requires more knowledge about some system concepts.
Of course software not becoming abandonware would be best, but that’s not really something we can expect to happen. Even if Europe would make the absolutely banger move and enforce open-sourcing upon abandonment of software after a few years, it would still require a developer to fix issues. The architecture of the OS should be set up so it’s as easy as possible to make something run, using concepts (like file management) as many people as possible are familiar with.
We might be in different bubbles in this case. Please be aware I’m talking about the very loud toxic minority (hopefully it’s a minority…) who constantly shit about how things aren’t following “KISS” close enough, that your app or distro is bloated, etc. It feels like if I was collecting all statements against Flatpak, systemd, even just static linking that boil down to “it’s bloated! It’s not KISS! Bad!” (so not well-reasoned criticism) I read or hear, including around my local hackspace or on events, I could fill whole books.
Not actively, no. The issue here is rather that, for way too long, we didn’t care enough. We had things working comparatively nicely one or two decades ago, but in more recent history the support deteriorated to such a degree the Linux desktop has become, to a huge degree, inaccessible to blind people (mostly due to issues with Wayland). I didn’t save those blogposts or statements to show in discussions like these, but the takeaway from all of them is that “It used to work for me many years ago, but if I want a system that respects me today I’m forced to use Mac”. But of course you’re also right, it’s slowly getting better! (Correct me if I’m wrong, not a native speaker: “being alienated” doesn’t inherently imply malicious intent of doing so, does it?)
Sorry, I was really pissed off yesterday evening by earlier comments in the chain implying it’s good to “filter out people” and got carried away. This one is completely on me.