[enos]

A big problem is that the Linux world loves to fragment itself.

There is no "Linux" to bundle. You have to pick a distro.

On the surface all major distros look like a good choice, but for unclear reasons they're all incompatible with each other despite doing the same things in the same ways.

For techies it doesn't matter because they can get any distro to work if one works. But it matters a lot for non-techies because things like tribal knowledge and even packages are all incompatible.

[progman]

> A big problem is that the Linux world loves to fragment itself.

I am using Linux for >25 years. The "big" problem actually turned out a big advantage since I was never forced to go with any immature mainstream.

For instance, when the KDE 4.0 and Gnome 3.0 disasters came which replaced the excellent KDE 3.x and Gnome 2.x desktops I could switch to another Linux Desktop without any hassle.

This would have been impossible with Win 8. Windows users had to endure the pain (someone called it "epic fail") until MS recognized that they made a mistake. Now they have to get used to Win10 which loves to phone home. They have no other option, except switching to OSX or Linux.

[BoorishBears]

Too bad 99.9% of the time Windows gets the UI right enough for most users. From what, Win 95? the first time complaints about the UI became mainstream was Windows 8 ("It looks like it's for touch screens!"), and from 8.1 onward those complaints faded back to being mostly from power users. Through all that I can still run a UI application written for Win 2000 and have it work fine.

I'd be fine if I had to deal with one Linux desktop that took a wrong turn for a year or two if it meant that desktop would provide backwards compatibility to the 1990s instead of breaking API compatibility whenever it seems cool.

[progman]

> Too bad 99.9% of the time Windows gets the UI right enough for most users.

True for Win7, wrong since >Win7. I would have agreed if you mentioned iOS. Anyway, today Android has the greatest market share, and that's running Linux.

> I'd be fine if I had to deal with one Linux desktop that took a wrong turn for a year or two if it meant that desktop would provide backwards compatibility to the 1990s instead of breaking API compatibility whenever it seems cool.

Breaking API compatibility has always been a problem in the Windows world (first DOS, then Win16, then Win32, then .NET, now Metro).

The Linux/Unix world is much more sustainable. You can likely still use applications which were written twenty years ago.

[BoorishBears]

>True for Win7, wrong since >Win7.

True since Win9x to my knowledge and only wrong once during Win 8 for most users (as I said in my comment)

>Anyway, today Android has the greatest market share, and that's running Linux.

And it also has horrid fragmentation, basic UI APIs so broken across singular versions of their OS they need to ship a support library to work around device specific bugs and bring in new features. Also as a full time Android dev who works with embedded installations of Android, sure Android is Android/Linux, but it's not really productive to treat it as Linux past a few basic party tricks like chroot and such.

>Breaking API compatibility has always been a problem in the Windows world (first DOS, then Win16, then Win32, then .NET, now Metro).

What? If anything Windows is known for never being willing to break old versions of things. There's the story of Win 9x containing flags for SimCity to emulate Win 3.x behavior just to keep compatibility. And way more stories like that one: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

Not to mention your list doesn't really make sense... what does Metro have to do with .NET, and what does .NET have to do with Win32, Win16, or DOS? I mean, for the record Windows 8 32-bit runs Win16 apps, has Metro, runs .NET applications and DOS applications, but that doesn't really mean anything?

>The Linux/Unix world is much more sustainable. You can likely still use applications which were written twenty years ago.

A UI application using MFC written against Win 2k will still work out of the box on a Windows 10 PC. What about an application written against Gnome 1.2. on Ubuntu 16.x?

[daurnimator]

> What? If anything Windows is known for never being willing to break old versions of things

Windows breaks horribly between upgrades. I know many people still using windows 7 because they're afraid to upgrade.

I remember this thread from last week too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603837

[BoorishBears]

"Breaking" in that sense isn't the same as in the sense my posts are talking about.

It's "breaking" in the sense of compatibility. If an app runs on Win 7 and Win 10, Win 10 didn't break compatibility between Win7 and Win 10 because an upgrade doesn't go through properly.

And while I have heard plenty of issues with upgrades, I've also personally had 0 issues with them since 7, on any of my personal machines, even some in the insider track.

Even in the thread you link to almost every other response is in line with what I mean: "it's usually very very hard to accidentally make a program run on Windows version N but not on Windows Version N+1"

[tornadoboy55]

So does Linux. Before I had a MacBook I tried Ubuntu on my PC twice (this is back in 2007 and another time in 2011) and both times an upgrade made Ubuntu unbootable(!). These days its nicer, but the 'Linux is more stable' myth is only true if you stick to servers/CLI. Desktop its Mac > Windows > Linux and on laptops its Mac >> Windows >>>>>>>>>>> Linux

[flukus]

> True since Win9x to my knowledge and only wrong once during Win 8 for most users

A lot of that is still there in windows 10, it's still half phone OS, half desktop. Makes KDE/Gnome differences look irrelevant in comparison.

[qplex]

In my experience, users were rather confused and lost with the UI overhaul in Windows Vista.

With Windows 8 users could not even figure out how to log in to the system.

Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP was more consistent.

>The Linux/Unix world is much more sustainable. You can likely still use applications which were written twenty years ago.

It's true that the kernel API on Linux is quite stable, but that doesn't get you very far with most applications, since they are usually linked against some old library, which depends on another old library etc.