[barrkel]

Another reason is commitment to binary compatibility of a set of components over a time scale of 10 years or more. Linux has historically been relatively unstable, with an ideological focus on source rather than binary compatibility; and fragmented into different distros, which may have different ideas about which versions, configurations etc. of components are pieced together.

That's a perfectly understandable focus - even laudable, if you take the GNU line - but it makes it hard to release reliable, tested binary software. The landscape has too many variables.

I think this is a significantly bigger problem than install base. And I think it would be addressed with an appropriate focus on exactly the problem Ingo is pointing out: the lack of a defined, high quality core that can be relied upon.

[_delirium]

You can statically link binaries and distribute those, which companies do when there's enough of a market to bother. That's how Matlab is distributed, for example. I think the bigger problem is that there usually isn't enough of a market; AutoCAD was discontinued on Unix because too many shops were retiring their Unix workstations in favor of Windows desktops, not because Unix software distribution was too hard.

[barrkel]

Sure you can statically link binaries, so long as you have a license for all those libraries, or if you write your own UI etc. from the ground up not much removed from the X protocol. And when UI refreshes come around, your UI will look frozen in time in a way that UIs using standard controls don't in Windows.

And how about those libraries that control shared resources? For example, sound output. It's been many years since I bothered to try and use Linux as a desktop OS, but I recall wholesale choices of sound subsystems, with options for one subsystem to emulate another, etc. How well would that mess work with static linking? And these are only the most basic of shared resources; not thinking about file/app association, icon display in file managers, and other really really basic OS services that have seen repeated whole reinvention in Linux.

IME Linux is unusable beyond the command-line, preferably via ssh.

[_delirium]

The semi-standard commercial solution for widget toolkits, excluding old software tied to something legacy, is typically to use Qt, which has both LGPL and (reasonably priced) commercial license options. Audio isn't really a problem for statically linked apps not doing anything particularly strange; it works fine in anything I've tried. Even ancient audio APIs in ancient binaries are transparently emulated through something-or-other in a way that "just works".

If you haven't used Linux in "many years", that might be the source of your impressions. I remember mucking with that kind of stuff on Slackware in 1998, but I haven't touched OSS or ALSA or whatever in a decade; it just does its thing under the hood. Audio even works fine when I run Windows applications under Wine!

[barrkel]

I use Linux every day; I haven't used desktop Linux much since a fairly unpleasant experience with the original Eee PC (701, in 2007).

But package management (I live with Debian apt-get and friends) is a bane of my life. Generally, the binaries that come when I install a package are too old, or don't have the right compile-time options configured, or there is some dependency missing that I don't have installed and is for some reason missing in the repository due to bitrot. It's usually more reliable to download the source, configure, build and install it the old-fashioned way. That also means fixing build errors, tracking down missing libraries, and generally a whole load of work I wouldn't trust an otherwise fairly competent software engineer to do, never mind the average user.

[icebraining]

What distro do you use? It's very much not my experience on Debian (Sid).

[luser001]

You use debian and are complaining about old binaries? I think they consider it a feature.

I use Ubuntu desktop/server and etc and my experiences with the package managers have been flawless.

[justincormack]

The Eee PC Linux install was terrible. I installed Ubuntu almost immediately.

[barrkel]

Yes; first I reenabled the underlying UI so that I had access to a console; soon after I installed Eeebuntu when it was put together by the community. I never used the original limited UI for more than perhaps 60 minutes total.