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Meneth | 1 month ago

That seems mostly useful for proprietary programs. I don't like it.

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Faelian2|1 month ago

I did wrote a small open-source tool in Rust. And I too did encounter that kind of issue when I did start to build a .deb.

Honestly, it was the kind of bug that is not fun to fix, because it's really about dependency, and not some fun code issue. There is no point in making our life harder with this to gatekeep proprietary software to run on our platform.

juliangmp|1 month ago

Why? Foss software also benefits from less dependency hell.

breezykoi|1 month ago

For distro-packaged FOSS, binary compatibility isn't really a problem. Distributions like Debian already resolve dependencies by building from source and keeping a coherent set of libraries. Security fixes and updates propagate naturally.

Binary compatibility solutions mostly target cases where rebuilding isn't possible, typically closed source software. Freezing and bundling software dependencies ultimately creates dependency hell rather than avoiding it.

seba_dos1|1 month ago

Yeah, in my 20 years of using and developing on GNU/Linux the only binary compatibility issues I experienced that I can think of now were related to either Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader or games.

Adobe stuff is of the kind that you'd prefer to not exist at all rather than have it fixed (and today you largely can pretend that it never existed already), and the situation for games has been pretty much fixed by Steam runtimes.

It's fine that some people care about it and some solutions are really clever, but it just doesn't seem to be an actual issue you stumble on in practice much.

whizzter|1 month ago

The solution to games is to load Windows games instead of Linux binaries.

Basically the way for the year of the Linux desktop is to become Windows.

paddim8|1 month ago

Probably because your distro purposefully keeps software out of date because it is too fragile otherwise. I don't think that is reasonable at all for desktop use.