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  • qqq@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    This is not semantics at all. You earlier say that Linux not having a stable ABI is the cause of a ton of problems.

    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.

    Android doesn’t make any more Linux ABI guarantees than anyone else: because it’s using the Linux kernel. I can easily compile a program targeting a generic aarch64 with a static musl C and run the binary on Android. So no, it isn’t semantics, it is good proof that you’re not correct in claiming that Linux ABI stability is terrible. Maybe you’re using the term “Linux ABI” more loosely than everyone else, but that’s not “just semantics”, the Linux ABI is a well defined concept and the parts of it that are stable are well defined.

    Life is Strange: Before the Storm shipped with native Linux support back in 2017. That was a different era - glibc 2.26 was current, and some developers made the unfortunate choice of linking against internal, undocumented glibc symbols.

    The very first line of your blog post that you shared. That has nothing do do with Linux ABI stability, or honestly even glibc ABI stability, if you’re going to use symbols that are explicitly internal you can’t get annoyed when they change…? That’s a terrible example.

    Adobe still shipped CS6 until 2017, so it’s 9 years old. That’s not particularly ancient, and it’s backed by… well Adobe. They have a bit of money. [EDIT: https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/cs6-install-instructions.html actually it’s still available on their site so… I wouldn’t expect any issues]

    Did you run Total Annihilation through Steam? I found this link https://steamcommunity.com/app/298030/discussions/0/1353742967805047388/ and people even had to modify things that way. It’s very impressive that it runs at all and yes, Windows is most definitely the king of backwards compatibility. Or at least it used to be, I’m happy to know very little about modern Windows, and it’s definitely not backwards compatible with hardware…

    The person who wrote the “filtered out comment” was batshit crazy and clearly didn’t even know what they were talking about. “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” is one of the most nonsense statements I’ve read on Lemmy. I wish I had more downvotes available.

    It’s important to remember that the Linux kernel has millions of dollars and full time devs from companies like Google and Microsoft working on it. The Linux Desktop space does not have that. Like at all. Linux Desktop is predominantly a volunteer project. Valve has started putting money into it which is great, but that’s very recent.