[roflcopter69]

> why not just move to treating linux as the first class platform

This is where the argument goes back to Win32 is the most stable API in Linux land. There isn't a thing such as the Linux API so that would have to be invented first. Try running an application that was built for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Good luck with that. Don't get me wrong, I primarily use and love Linux, but reality is quite complicated.

[Grimblewald]

stability has critical mass. When something is relied on by a small group of agile nerds, we tend not to worry about how fast we move or what is broken in the process. Once we have large organisations relying on a thing, we get LTS versions of OS's etc.

The exact same is true here. If large enough volumes of folks start using these projects and contribute to them in a meaningful way, then we end up with less noisy updates as things continue to receive input from a large portion of the population and updates begin more closely resembling some sort of moving average rather than a high variance process around that moving average. If not less noisy updates, then at least some fork that may be many commits behind but at least when it does update things in a breaking way, it comes with a version change and plenty of warning.

[concinds]

Sounds similar to macOS.

[lenkite]

MacOS apps are primarily bound to versioned toolchains and SDK's and not to the OS version. If you are not using newer features, your app will run just fine. Any compatibility breaks are published.

[ryandrake]

> Try running an application that was built for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Good luck with that.

Yea, this is a really bad state of affairs for software distribution, and I feel like Linux has always been like this. The culture of always having source for everything perhaps contributes to the mess: "Oh the user can just recompile" attitude.