What he's saying is true, but also i think the app-store type approach that apt-get provides is a major benefit.
With windows i have to find some random program, hope its not malware, possibly pay for it, etc. With linux, i have reasonable assurance that packages (from main repos) aren't evil, they are free (as in beer), and i can easily search through and find something for my usecase. I can't really do that in windows.
Having a system-wide package manager where nearly all libraries are dynamically linked also has its drawbacks.
A seemingly minor update might cause a huge cascade of dependency updates which causes common Linux distributions to tend to one of these two extreme solutions:
Either fix all packages in place and freeze their version numbers or just "give up" and update everything all the time. Both solutions feel like compromises to me.
Other end-user OSes don't act like this. On Android/iOS/macOS/Windows, I can have the latest 3rd party software without having to deal with intrusive updates to the OS infrastructure all the time.
The BSDs handle this better, and maybe something like Ubuntu LTS + Nix on top of it might be a way around this.
> On Android/iOS/macOS/Windows, I can have the latest 3rd party software without having to deal with intrusive updates to the OS infrastructure all the time.
That's not really true. The .NET runtime isn't redistributable, and so has to be installed on the host OS, which usually works but not always (and pre-Windows 10, newer versions of .NET required a bunch of KBs, which meant that Windows Update was actually working and able to install those, which fairly frequently broke on Windows 7 due to the lack of Service Packs). Nowadays this is less of a problem, due to improved .NET compatibility and .NET 4.x coming pre-installed on Windows 10. Which honestly is great - you can compile and run .NET 4.x programs on any Windows 10 machine. Granted, it's some relatively outdated version by now, but it is still very nice to have a "proper" programming language out of the box, and also the ability to compile to small .exe's.
Similarly, MSVC runtimes (except the installers are redistributable, but you are still in the situation of "have to globally install it").
The old one “.NET Framework” is an OS component but has enough compat that you can always upgrade it.
The newer one (net5+) is typically fully bundled with each app so no sharing.
MSVC also went this way - you bundle them rather than take a dependency on a system wide runtime. These two (.NET and c++ runtimes) were basically the last shared libs on windows, and it’s now basically obsolete tech (.NET 4.X) or no-longer-recommended deployment method (Msvc).
I totally agree. This is one of the things that makes Windows feel like a second-tier OS to me compared with Linux and Mac. If I have to do something "tech-y", on Linux or Mac, I look for it in the package registry. I trust that action would probably have been taken by the community if it were doing something malicious, and usually I can find the project on github and peruse the source if I really want.
By contrast on Windows, it usually means finding some GUI-based utility on some sketchy website filled with ads, and maybe a fake download button. Probably it's freemium, so during the task maybe I have to dodge several calls to action to upgrade to the paid version. And then a week later, maybe I check the task manager, and find out it's gone and set itself to run in the background at startup, doing god knows what, without asking.
It's just one of the ways that Windows feels less like it's my computer.
The problem is that there are always going to be a ton of apps that aren't in the repos. The repos contain the top hundred apps that have a million user each, but they don't contain the top million apps that have a hundred users each. The repos get you most of the way there, sure, but they can't possibly provide every app that every user wants.
The AUR is wonderful. Ubuntu's support for PPAs comes in at a close second, though less from a tech standpoint and more because of Ubuntu's massive community. Both provide a middle ground, inbetween the ideal of the package manager (which almost always works) and the frustration of trying to build the software from source. With the AUR, someone else has resolved most of the kinks for me already, and that's time saved that I can really appreciate.
The fact that people just listed 4 competing tools shows exactly why this is a problem:
2 of them are essentially community run, and could theoretically at any time be taken over by a hostile (or even just an incompetant) entity and be used to distribute malware. Not that this couldn't happen through an official channel, but it's certainly far less likely.
Since the software distribution is not even, I currently have to check choco, scoop and winget for updates. It's slow and irritating, and if I need to uninstall or check a package, I need to figure out which tool I installed it with.
The software that does crossover between package managers can cause compatability issues. Just today I accidentally broke Rider since I had the .NET Core runtime installed through choco, but the .NET Core SDK installed through scoop.
I get they're trying to finally fix this through WinGet, but I can't help feel it's too little, too late.
Yeah, but the average debian user just uses apt. Other people do other things, but as a debian user my experience is basically just one place, which is what matters.
Also the worst named package manager ever. I wanted to play with an RTOS for an embedded system a few weeks ago an the first step was "install chocolatey".
Not knowing what it was, I had to spend some time reading about chocolatey.
I know it must be some 3rd generation pun or something but it really put me off going any further. Names are important.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive! The package repo need only be a list of “endorsed” applications/binaries once they’ve been packaged. The fact that it requires so much work on the package maintainers’ part (essentially duplicating the effort for every distribution) is the main problem being pointed out — and that is original to what you’re expressing.
Except that all my packages are out of date, and manually install a ton of stuff because of missing features or unpatched bugs. But it's a good first start.
Worth watching. But if you don’t... [Linux desktop sucks because application writers don’t make binaries that “just work”, pushing the user to always just have to recompile for their system, they try and address this in the kernel by not breaking things, but the distributions to and screw it all up, because breaking is fine so long as it’s “improving”]
Tons of contrary points I’m sure, but duh. It’s really nice to be able to run Windows 3.1 code on a Windows Server 2019, the idea is nice, practicality aside.
As someone who could run Linux desktop, I see it as the same reason I don’t root an android phone, I do enough tweaking and tinkering in my own code that sometimes I just want tools that immediately work. So I can do my other work. Linux as a system, great, as a desktop, I’ll never set one up for someone I don’t want to hear from all the time.
My work laptop. My wife's PC. Our plex/jellyfin media server.
My sister's pc and my elderly parents PC are also ubuntu.
I have found my support time for all of them dramatically went down after I got them off windows.
Windows slowing down over time. I longer happens, lengthening the age of hardware and pushing off OS reinstalls, which can at times cost money based on the OEM model.
I can still suck more juice out of a machine with a RAM and add drive upgrade, again, without paying for a reinstall, and saving them lots of money in the process.
LTS/stable distros just work, out of the box, for most people.
Its people like me who have an incessant need to tweak everything that will mess up a Linux desktop.
> LTS/stable distros just work, out of the box, for most people.
Do you have any source for this? I know a few people who use Linux (or used it in the past, including myself), and number of complaints is definitely a lot higher than from the people on macOS/Windows.
The only real difficulties I've had is someone else buying them a scanner/printer combo and manually having to get drivers from the manufacturer's site and install them creating a problem when the driver packages depend on libraries not available in the repos any longer. But for me, it takesa bout 20 min of googling around to find the solution.
And other than that problem, I rarely if ever, have to support them for anything.
Half the time when i do, it's because they got banned from a website and didn't understand it, or they were having internet problems and it was unrelated to the OS.
My mother doesn't "like" Linux, but she can't articulate why. She's been wanting to "upgrade" my dad's computer for years as this sneaky way of getting away from Linux. But the reality is, as old as my Dad is - the XFCE desktop environment is more familiar to him, coming from Windows XP/7, than Windows 8.1-10 is.
It's also pretty helpful, frankly, that when something - other than updates - requires root access, he just backs away and doesn't mess with things. Same for my sibling.
This, in itself, has prevented a lot of problems IMHO. People just click "yes" and escalate their privs in Windows without giving a second through about it.
I tried Ubuntu with my parents. Caused lots of problems. Moving dad back to Windows and my mum to a MacBook Air. I haven’t done the whole support call in 3 years now.
Is it a preference or a requirement that when someone points out issues with Linux, in this case from Linus... that Linux users must come to tell you all about how they use it successfully?
Instead of thinking of Linux for non-technical users, I think you can actually segment non-technical users into people who use a computer and people who use a browser. People who just use a browser for virtually everything (i.e. people who can use a Chromebook and think that it's basically the same as a normal laptop) are actually very common and can use Linux just fine. I had a friend who needed a home computer but was desperately poor. I gave them a machine I picked up at a garage sale with Ubuntu on it. They've been using it for years and have never looked back. After they had been using it for a while I mentioned something to them about their computer having an unusual operating system, and they really didn't have a clue what I was talking about. Because they had never paid attention to the operating system beyond the clicking the browser icon.
Now yeah that's not true for people who will want to plug in different printers all the time, and install Microsoft Office specifically, etc. Surprisingly I think it's actually the people with a medium amount of technical knowledge that have the most trouble adapting to Linux.
But even as someone who virtually never uses anything but Linux, I don't really get the constant drive to have this "year of the Linux desktop". It works fine for me and I love it. I make my smug comment when Windows and OS X users have problems but I'm not in a rush to help them with their problems or give them new ones. If you're bothered enough by the mainstream options to switch, you can learn a few new things. If not, I don't see the problem.
Edit: and I think Linus focuses too much on Debian here. Even in 2014, Ubuntu was already a very easy to use and out-of-the-box distro. Even Fedora was pretty good. My distribution doesn't package Zoom, but if I go to their website and click install I get the right binary and the experience is comparably easy to Microsoft Windows installers. If you're on a fringe distro, you almost certainly love the power that comes with (and requires) building everything from source regularly. So again, I don't see the problem. If you want to be included in Debian, using Debian's shared libraries doesn't seem like an unreasonable policy. It's quite easy to ship an application that is easy to install and upgrade independently. Google Chrome is another app that does it super well. More people would do it if there was demand, but there isn't, and I don't think that's just an app packaging problem at all.
For Zoom: Even better, you just type flatpak install zoom or snap install zoom and get a community maintained version that has many potential incompatibilities taken care of. Or any user that doesn't want to use the terminal can just search gnome / ubuntu software and find zoom in there and click install.
>> It’s really nice to be able to run Windows 3.1 code on a Windows Server 2019
You can also run the same version of a newest app on Windows 7 and Windows 10. At least, you could back when 7 was still supported, and you probably still can, but I didn't check.
Try installing a package targeting Ubuntu 21.04 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS? :) (Replace Ubuntu with a distro of your choince in the previous sentence.)
For all its flaws -- and it has many -- Windows is a platform while a Linux distro is a ball of tightly-coupled packages.
> I do enough tweaking and tinkering in my own code that sometimes I just want tools that immediately work
Interestingly, that's exactly the reason I continue to use Linux. Depends on what you're doing, but for the boring work I do, I never have to tinker. Install and use. Once in a while do a boring update.
While I think a lot of the complaints he raises here are still relevant 7 years later, it's interesting that both MacOS and Windows have trended more towards a package management system with their respective app stores--with MacOS especially discouraging downloading or running any apps from outside that ecosystem.
Since one can reasonably expect to target "Windows" or "MacOS" the packages in these app stores can be maintained directly by their developers which avoids a lot of the problems that Linus talked about in this video. When you get past the surface layer concept of, "We've sort of overblown this whole package management thing," it's really an argument that the fragmentation of the distributions and shared libraries that can't reasonably be shared.
Even using Arch with its rolling release model and making liberal use of the AUR for the most bleeding edge, I've found myself in exactly the situation Linus describes of needing a newer version of a package because the older one flat out doesn't work for me. I can make it work because I'm technical enough to roll my own package if I need to; but, even my wife who is pretty tech-savvy herself wouldn't be willing or able to go down that route.
IMO, the fact that the conversion in these comments will be rich with opinion and debate (almost all of which will be informed and intelligent) is the crux of the problem. Too many cooks have built too many kitchens--or some such metaphor. :)
Agree. And want to add one point which people seem to ignore in discussion like this.
>> needing a newer version of a package because the older one flat out doesn't work for me
The reverse situation is also a problem. For me personally, even a bigger problem.
Imagine, you're happy with a supported Ubuntu LTS version and don't want to upgrade to a non-LTS version. If there's a new version of this one package you would really like to use that targets a newer version of Ubuntu, you're out of luck, basically.
For example, maybe KDevelop replaced its home-grown C++ parsing engine with libclang. It's a huge change, you'd really like to give it a shot. Well, the only option is to upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu.
Yes, there may be a PPA that has the new KDevelop targeting your LTS version. But there's an equal chance such a PPA doesn't exist. Or it has pretty much the whole set of KDE libs as its dependencies; those will not only pollute your system but also can mess up your KDE installation. Also an anonymous person made the PPA and you decide to trust them at your own risk. And when you're finally ready to upgrade, you'll have to re-add PPAs manually. Etc, etc, etc.
Snap solves both problems rather well. And in contrast to flatpak, there're official builds of VSCode and JetBrainds IDEs in the snap store. Maybe other software too -- didn't really look it up.
One problem with snap is forced updates, of course. Ubuntu developers really need to add an option to disable them.
Thanks for sharing! I do think that reverse situation is an often overlooked problem; though, one that I've never found to affect me personally.
I honestly don't know enough about Snap or Flatpak to really comment on them and their advantages and disadvantages. I've always shied away from them because I can't shake Xzibit in my head, "Yo dawg, I heard you like package managers so we put a package manager in your package manager!"
What exactly is the Linux Desktop? There are too many of them.
"If you have several watches you cannot tell exact time".
Likewise "several Linux WMs - no Linux Desktop at all".
Creating Linux desktop application these days is the same task as to create multiplatform application that will run on Windows, MacOS, Linux/GTK, Linux/KDE, Linux/... (~40 of those more).
Conceptually we can use XWindow primitives (if it is used in particular WM),
but that does not help at all when your application need to show "file open" dialog or the like.
If someone would ask me to establish Linux Desktop architecture I'll start from defining WindowProc(HWND,MSG,WPARAM,LPARAM,LPRESULT*):BOOL abstraction. Similar to VERY stable WndProc concept of Microsoft Windows. Plus defining stable API that all WMs should implement.
Only after that we may see real Linux Desktop - not just WM but bunch of useable applications.
Right, 2014. Although I’m not sure anything has improved on his main complaints. There is no possibility of compatibility between binaries for the end user which means the experience will rarely be download and run. The distorts will always be incompatible, the package managers don’t care about you, and the core system components will break things in the name of progress (for them, hope you can come along!).
Linus Torvalds uses AppImage for his diving app subsurface. He is on the record saying he endorses it, and you can find a quote by him on the AppImage website. I don’t think he would have anything good to say about snap. I don’t think he has said anything about flatpak
I switched to Linux around the same time as you. Before that I was a Windows user from 1997 until ~2008. In the late 1990s and early 2000s people just accepted that Windows crashing everyday was a normal feature of that software, and they blamed every crash on user error, eg: "your drivers are bad", "you're running buggy software", etc. My Windows 98 install couldn't run for more than ~4 hours without crashing, it was infuriating. Windows 2000 did better, but it would still crash once every couple of days.
Linux was a million times more stable and much more pleasant to use as a programmer (no SDKs to download with complex installation instructions). It also had a package manager which made installs/reinstalls a breeze. You could actually write a bash script to redo your setup automatically, wow! Never looked back.
I recently installed Windows 8 on an older computer I was setting up for my mom (she didn't want Linux, understandably). It was my first time using Windows in two years or so. Windows Update was broken out of the box. It wouldn't run. You had to manually download a patch to get it to work. I don't really understand why desktop Linux gets so much hate when commercial software is this bad.
Do note that Windows Update may just not offer a major update because such as Windows 10 2004 because of concerns about driver compatibility. It happened to me because Microsoft and the manufacturer of the PC didn't come to an agreement about driver compatibility. Windows update gave me warning about updating to the new Windows 10 version (to 2004 or 20H2), but there was no update for it in Windows Update, I had to download the update manually to get it installed. Also had to do that manually for a previous version as well.
I guess my point was, Windows should have just as much of a reputation, given Microsoft has shipped release builds with absolutely horrible and blatant bugs (does anyone remember windows millennium?).
I did do some research before I bought my printer and found a brother that connects to wifi and works flawlessly with both Mac and Linux. I find you can also make your life much easier as a Linux user by choosing popular distributions. It's always easy to Google specific fixes for Ubuntu.
I have an old Canon scanner that doesn't work on Windows because Canon never released a driver for anything after Windows XP. Works like a charm on Linux though.
Same experience with an old Nikon Super CoolScan negative scanner I recently bought used. It came with a Firewire PCI card. I installed the card, plugged in the scanner and it just worked.
No, printers/scanners work without the manufacturer's software; if it's supported (which, I admit, is incomplete but more than you might expect), you just plug it in, tell CUPS to add a printer (which it can do seamlessly without installing extra garbage from the manufacturer), open Simple Scan (or any other SANE frontend) and off you go.
Where I am, it's much much cheaper to get a laptop with the least possible amount of RAM preinstalled but -- importantly! -- with two RAM slots.
Then just buy two stick of fast RAM and install them yourself. It often doesn't void your warranty (but make sure to check the warranty of your specific laptop, obviously).
Got a Thinkpad during one of their sales last year for $1300 that had a generation old i7 and 48gb of RAM. Had the Dolby HDR 4K screen and a bunch of other odds and ends as well.
Didn’t look if there was an option without Windows preinstalled since it was for my wife.
Added bonus: lots of ports, onboard HDMI, onboard ethernet
If you need something now probably not a huge help, but if you’re not in a rush might be worth keeping an eye on.
Refurbished Lenovo Thinkpads on eBay or Amazon is what I've gone with for my past two machines. Not disappointed at all. Quality builds for quality prices.
I like my Dell XPS15. It came with Windows and runs Fedora flawlessly. I maxed out RAM, extra SSD, and GPU because I do a lot of ML consulting (AWS works well too, but its nice to have my own hardware).
Much cheaper than Apple. I use an Apple 2015 MBP for a client's requirements. It screws up my muscle memory. The OS is ok I suppose but it's no Linux.
The real issue, macos has one distribution, Windows has one distribution, Linux has so many I doubt anyone really keeps track. The issue with Linux is they’re working in fragments instead of as one. The problem is oss not the operating system but the culture it was developed in.
I don't know. I understand what you are saying, but if there was just one Linux desktop it would almost certainly have to be tailored to the lowest common denominator user and it would end up just being a less polished MacOC version. The fragmentation forces some degree of interoperability which enables more specialized and innovative approaches, like tilling window managers,functional package managers, weird shell languages. In other words, the fragmentation might be an innovation and specialization enabling feature, rather than a bug.
I guess the theory is open competition and whoever builds the best thing gets all the market and everything else dies. The only problem with that is that if you have spent years developing something, especially if you weren't paid for it, you are not likely to want to accept defeat and lose your investment.
Maybe the way to sort this is to create Linux groups around certain topics like graphics or music production and then the people with the specific skills can contribute to multiple applications at the same time (at least their design work). This way, if one product dies, their work lives on in other products.
This isn't really a bad thing. There are lot of enterprisey distros that I absolutely despise the package management and culture. If they all operated under one I can only imagine how political the whole process would be to get anything accomplished.
In the mid-90's, I had hope that GNU/Linux would eventually evolve into either GNOME or KDE as the main desktop environment with their frameworks filling the same role as Kits in OS X, BeOS, WinAPI.
Instead, it is not only the distributions, the whole desktop stacks keep being re-invented way more that what Apple or Microsoft have done thus far.
Then there are the whole set of GNOME and KDE forks from those not happy with those reboots.
Not a surprise that only ChromeOS and Android have managed to have stuck as desktop/mobile variants of Linux based OSes.
So those are the only "desktop" Linux that I ended up caring about.
I don't care about window transitions and compiz fusion or anything flashy about my window manager anymore. Xfce. Happy camper since 2015 as my main dev environment. Just run my programs please and provide some easy tools to position multiple windows.
I hear what he is saying, although I haven't run into issues with applications so much. It makes you respect how much trouble Microsoft has gone to through the years.
If I've had a problem with desktop Linux, it's been on the driverish edges. Sleep behavior, printers, graphics cards, wifi, multiple monitors. That's also what seems to make OpenBSD a pain.
On the flip side, I found out recently that if you are sharing a printer connected to a Linux machine using CUPS, you can print to said printer FROM AN IPHONE!
This blew me away when I first tried it and then digging deeper realized it's b/c Apple was the maintainer of the CUPS library. Kudos to Apple for that integration!
It sounds like he's saying Linux desktop DEVELOPMENT sucks, not that using Linux desktop sucks.
I've been running (mostly ubuntu based) Linux since 2014. The only major problems I've had have been driver issues, userspace applications have largely worked out of the box. Maybe the devs behind everything I use are doing an exceptional job, but I've never noticed an update break a common application due to library changes.
It only soves the problem partially. The drawback of AppImage is that it cannot package an application containing multiple executables such as Emacs. The best solution may be coping Apples' app-bundle idea. An app-bundle is just a folder containing metadata, executables, shared libraries (dylibs), text files and images. This package format can be installed by just dragging and dropping the folder to /Applications directory and
deleted by just removing the folder. The Finder file manager shows the app bundle as the application icon and allows running the app by clicking on the app-bundle folder. This idea is easy to implement on Linux, it would decrease Linux fragmentation and the work duplication
that happens when packaging some application.
I think part of the problem is that there's so many "Does x not solve this problem?" solutions now all with their own unique downsides and upsides, it reminds me of that one xkcd[0].
I spent time in MIPI PHY and I am very familiar with this issue. appimage isn't the same kind of solution though because there were zero competing solutions. There were no universal linux binaries. Having one is a much better situation.
Linus is right about being angry when binaries break. I remember google music actually provided a linux upload client... in a later fedora release, it broke. ISTR a library it depended on broke it in some way in the newer version. The issue is there's no Linus in library land and there couldn't be anyway.
I run RHEL 7 desktop, because it's what my vendors support (scientific / engineering desktop applications, simulators). I'm about to get a new Thinkpad, and highly considering running Fedora because packages on it weren't written in 2002 (sarcasm) and use it side by side to my RHEL 7 dekstop, even if some of my work applications won't run on it.
Linus is completely correct, though. I think the open source world has gotten way to mixed up with the "free" world. I understand that gcc and some of the HUGE packages are free and open source. They are cost shared by companies and have many people that use them and are maintained well. But other packages with small user bases? His dive example was perfect. Unless someone uses it personally, how can you expect to maintain it unless you pay for it? Or, if the software is paid, how can you expect the company to maintain it for Linux, when their user base is going to be for Mac / Windows?
I think Ubuntu LTS is the most sane approach I've seen. You can get relatively new packages in a pretty stable environment. It's not RHEL stable, and Canonical is starting to care less and less about desktop Linux, but it's not too bad. Ubuntu needs Vanilla gnome option by default, though. Their default look is horrendous. I know I know, it's Linux, you can customize it! Why should I have to waste my time?
This has improved a lot. Hardware support has caught up. I'm using a 1 year old laptop with hard to support hybrid graphics (AMD integrated, NVIDIA dedicated). In Fedora, it all worked out of the box. And you get an extra 50% battery life over Windows. In 2010, when I last ran a laptop with hybrid graphics, setting up Bumblebee was a disaster.
The only line I had to type into a terminal in Fedora 34 to make it a GUI-usable system was adding the default flathub repo. That fixes the package manager issue. Most people have so much bandwidth and storage coming with their devices, shared libraries make less and less sense anyway.
I've no idea how people manage to flawlessly run their nvidia GPU. Prime is OK but having to open apps with prime-run like sudo is such a drag. Does your laptop have a BIOS switch?
Linux distribution landscape is diverse (complex) and emphasis is on shipping source code and not something (binary) that real people use. For example something is broken so do you tell grandma to download source code and compile it or do you give her a compiled binary that fixes the problem in one click?
This is still the case. Snaps and flatpaks help a bit. But for a lot of stuff, the easiest way is to run the Windows binary under Wine. Including open-source stuff.
it'd be interesting to try to make a hybrid static/dynamic library program. assume you can find the libraries you want on the system, but have a fallback where you go download some Debian packages & install them into your XDG_CACHE_DIR & load libraries from there, when the system (whatever os it is) didn't have it.
part of the trick would be making this code significantly smaller than doing a static build.
I feel similarly. It seems to have a lot of good things going for it.
When I first investigated it like a decade ago, one majorly offputting aspect about it is that I didn't see it as offering the capability to install multiple copies of things. I greatly prefer systems where i can blue-green deploy services locally, or otherwise have special purpose instances, and Nix, at the time, didn't seem to have much interest in that. I believe things have changed a lot in that regard, or perhaps my couple hours spent as an utter neophyte poking around for answers didn't surface the clues.
I would say that, these days, I am far less interested in configuring a system. I am far less interested in the desktop. To me, my time is 100% not worth investing in these goals. I am trying to focus on working with & orchestrating a fleet of machines, in a coordinated fashion. I believe free-software folks should all be re-investing, re-focusing similarly, in running & operating personal/manorial/federalized "cloud" systems. I happen to agree with a lot of the philosophy of Kubernetes- a desired state management system for resources, and controller/operators that autonomically enact & maintain that state- and invest my time & work trying to make it an useful fabric for my & hopefully my friends digital homes.
One of the greatest problems of desktop Linux is the huge
fragmentation. Linux desktop has fewer users than MacOSX and Windows, and lots of distributions, each one with a different packaging methods and incompatible dependencies which may result in work duplication and dependency hell, that can happen if one needs to install an application outside of repository, but it needs a dependency that
overrides an already installed library. Other problems of Linux distributions is that they not allow keeping multiple versions of the same application and multiple versions of the same compiler. The packaging issue is not relevant for people using Linux as server due to Docker, that can package any application alongside the configuration, dynamic linker, GlibC and shared libraries.
Another reason why is hard to find binaries for Linux is the lack GlibC backward compatibility. Even a fully statically linked application or packaged with all shared libraries dependencies via LD_LIBRARY_PATH or RPATH may crash if the application was linked against a newer version of GLIBC and is deployed on an Linux distro with an older version of GLIBC. The linking error happens due to the
lack of backward compatibility of the GLibC, which is the main bridge between the user-space and kernel-space on Linux.
A possible solution for packaging an application for multiple distribution with minimal work duplication might be: 1 - minimize the number of dependencies; 2 - static link as much as possible; 3 - instead of linking directly against shared libraries such as Curl, Gtk or SSL, load those libraries through dlopen(), dlsym() Unix APIs;
4 - build the application on distro or docker containing an older version of GlibC for dealing with GlibC compatibility problems; 5 - pack all shared libraries dependencies on the same directory as the application setting RPATH to a relative path to the shared libraries dependencies; 6 - embed all files additional non-source files such as
images or text in the binary using resource compilation; 7 - distribute the application in a zipped archive; 8 - use GO (Golang) which is able to static link almost all dependencies and also bypass the GlibC by performing system calls directly. A golang binary will just run everywhere with minimal effort.
Linux distributions could make the developers life easier if they copied the MacOSX app bundle idea where applications are distributed as <APPLICATION-NAME>.app directories containing metadata, the executable and all shared libraries dependencies. The advantage of
this approach, is that the application can be installed by just dragging and dropping a folder to the /Applications directory and uninstalled by just deleting a directory. Another benefit is that the user can keep multiple versions of same application and not fear dependency hell or overriding a previously-installed library.
I'd add Fedora 34 (Or anything else that runs Gnome 40) to that list, the gnome team really outdid themselves with how polished and snappy it feels, especially when you're on a laptop using the trackpad gestures.
We have Linux on all desktops and laptops. This has been the case for more than 10 years by now. There are still a couple Windows VM's (mainly for checking how some things work on Windows in case need be).
No since there's one FreeBSD like there's one Ubuntu. But you still have the problem of supporting older versions. FreeBSD 13, 12, ... have different libraries and your program should consider that.
I'm going to vent a bit about this. My perspective is as someone who was a Windows user who moved to Linux 6 years ago after getting fed up with Microsoft.
I love the package managers on Linux distros. They are amazing. I feel physical pain whenever I have to jump through hoops to get software up and running outside of a package manager. That being said, I do a lot of hobby work on a Raspberry Pi 4. Not every package is built for arm64. Packages break, have issues with their dependencies, or fail cryptically for me. Building software from source for programs that do run on linux systems can be hit or miss. I understand I chose this with my specific platform of choice, and I have accepted this. But if I can support a solution that will make my life easier I will.
It's 2021 and we have Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage, and it's super frustrating. None of these tools solve the problem entirely and they all come with their own sets of drawbacks. That's okay it doesn't have to be perfect. But there are people who hate the entire concept of using these tools and will crap all over them every time they come up. They have valid criticism don't get me wrong, but in my opinion doing something and shipping it is better than doing nothing at all. I would love to see the solution to Snap, Flatpak and AppImage by I've yet to see anything from their biggest proponents. I just can't be bothered anymore wasting my energy listening to people who aren't actively trying to find solutions. If you are reading this and are working on a solution, I appreciate you.
So which to choose? I think based on Canonical's past and present behavior Snaps just have too much baggage for most people in the Linux community. This sucks as you have software packaged in Snaps from Microsoft, Nvidia, etc that aren't available as a Flatpak or AppImage.
AppImage has the blessing of Linus Torvalds, but if you say that aloud then you will have people say "So what?" as if Linus Torvalds is some just some guy. For better or for worse it means something when he supports things, and he does provide his software as an AppImage so take that for what you will.
Then there is Flatpak. If you look at Flatkill.org then the tool is just a pile of lies and security holes. With that being said my money is on either AppImage or Flatpak
With windows i have to find some random program, hope its not malware, possibly pay for it, etc. With linux, i have reasonable assurance that packages (from main repos) aren't evil, they are free (as in beer), and i can easily search through and find something for my usecase. I can't really do that in windows.