[corrral]

> To me it's this, Linux and it's distribution mechanism is skewed towards servers, and IT since that's where most of it's installed base is.

It's not just servers—not having a very capable, standard, base set of packages to rely on for a workstation-targeting release (say, of GUI programs) is a huge problem. Instead, distros differ wildly on what they provide, users may have different versions of packages or even entirely different programs or libraries (the entire window server may differ!) serving similar purposes, some libs may simply be absent, et c. This is kinda OK if you stick to running software your distro bundles and only at the official version for your release of the distro, but quickly becomes hell (for the people packaging your programs, if not for you) as soon as you step outside that.

This is why you see a lot of companies that support Linux for their commercial software being very specific about supporting e.g. only one or two distros, at some very limited set of versions. It's very hard to support "Linux" in general, especially for desktop-targeting software, because the Linux GUI and multimedia stacks are... well, they're a shitshow, frankly.

[skyde]

could someone explain why you say linux gui and multimedia are a shitshow!

GUI heavy application like chrome, firefox or openoffice run on all districts without any hiccup!

what am i missing ?

[corrral]

There are a ton more ways that very basic APIs and services can present to the user and to their programs, meaning far more ways for things to break. Way more possible combinations of not just version, but even which library or program is providing some capability.

The closest thing to a solution is picking one of the two big desktop environments and targeting that to give you some amount of consistency and stability, but it's not like people will only run your program in that DE (again, possibly not even in the same window server you developed on) so you may end up with bugs when e.g. your QT/KDE program runs under Enlightenment, plus a ton of basic stuff can still vary a lot even if you restrict support to one DE (think: audio daemon) which may affect all kinds of things in unexpected ways.

> GUI heavy application like chrome, firefox or openoffice run on all districts without any hiccup!

Ever seen a thread full of people exchanging advice on how to get these programs not to exhibit certain widespread glitches on Linux, many of which have been a problem for years? Thinking especially of things like tearing, or multimedia playback problems. They even crop up here on HN from time to time.

[mftb]

Agree. I have definitely dealt with that stuff at my work. My goal is to try and frame it in a way, that gets people discussing it productively.