Linus Tucao Desktop Linux

Text | Rocic

Exhibit | (ID: oschina2013)

Earlier, Linus Torvalds talked about some of the problems with desktop Linux at the DebConf 14 conference . Linus’s remarks have always been known for being radical and straightforward, and this sharing also points to the program compatibility issues of the Linux desktops of major distributions, and how bad this problem can bring to developers and ordinary users.

At the conference, Linus Torvalds pointed out an important reason for the split of Linux: he always asked each version of Linux to try not to change the core, not to destroy the user space, but basically no one obeys - every distribution is modifying the glibc library at will, Change the underlying API. Differences in these APIs prevent application developers from creating a generic package for “Linux” platforms, and an application’s binaries are usually only available for a certain distribution, such as Debian 10 or ubuntu 20. In addition to this, API changes made the application less backward compatible.

These are very serious compatibility issues, and adapting to split Linux distributions often tires developers out. Linus admitted that he was involved in a new project of chat software. He created binary file packages for both Windows and OSX, but did not create binary files for Linux. Not only in this new project, Linus’ original words are: “I generally don’t make binaries for the Linux desktop. Different Linux distributions have different rules. Adapting to different versions of Linux is a real pain.”

In addition to the program compatibility problems for developers, Linus also pointed out that the Linux desktop is too unfriendly to ordinary users who are not developers. What the average user needs is out of the box, they buy a device and then use the device’s OS for entertainment/work, for them the most important thing is a clear interface, stable applications. Suppose there is a non-technical user using ubuntu 20, and then there is a software compatibility problem after updating to ubuntu 21 version, then the user will spend a lot of time and energy searching for new programs for this incompatible application Install packages, check compatibility issues, retune/debug/compile applications on the system, while in Windows, the user only needs to click a software upgrade or re-download and install - imagine you are this user, would you choose Linux or Windows?

Unfortunately, the program compatibility problem pointed out by Linus 7 years ago still cannot be solved today, and the new Linux version is still further splitting the Linux software ecosystem. The good thing, of course, is that we have Flatpak, a unified package manager across Linux distributions, but even there are several such packages as Flatpak, Snap, and Appimage.

Interestingly, at that time Linus pointed out at the meeting: Valve will save the linux desktop version. Judging from the current situation, Linus’ vision is indeed accurate. Since the launch of the Linux -based game operating system SteamOS in 2013 , Valve has continued to improve the experience of ordinary game users on the Linux platform, including the launch of the Wine-based Proton software, which allows ordinary users to easily play Windows games on the Linux platform; It also cooperated with Nvidia to bring DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) to Linux. But Valve’s user group is only gamers. When will Linux be able to form a good ecosystem of applications and ordinary users? I’m afraid the premise is that all Linux distributions use a unified API/ABI like Windows, but this seems a little slim.

Here is the original video:

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