[einpoklum]

> So everything is properly designed but somehow there's a lot of general incompetence preventing it from working.

But it is working, actually:

* If you update your distro with binaries from apt, yum, zypper etc. - they work.

* If you download statically-linked binaries - they work.

* If you download Snaps/Flatpak, they work.

> it means that you have to build on the oldest bistro you can find so that the built binaries actually work on arbitrary machines you try to run it on.

Only if you want to distribute a dynamically-linked binary without its dependencies. And even then - you have to build with a toolchain for that distro, not with that distro itself.

[vlovich123]

> Only if you want to distribute a dynamically-linked binary

Even statically linked code tends to be dynamically linked against glibc. You’ve basically said “it works but only if you use the package manager in your OS”. In other words, it’s broken and hostile for commercial 3p binary distribution which explains the state of commercial 3p binary ecosystem on Linux (there’s more to it than just that, but being actively hostile to making it easy to distribute software to your platform is a compounding factor).

I really dislike snaps/flat pack as they’re distro specific and overkill if I’m statically linking and my only dynamic dependency is glibc.

[lelandbatey]

Glibc is fantastically stable and backwards compatible in all the same ways , and I think you're overstating how backwards compatible windows is as well. Microsoft has the exact same dynamic library issues that Linux does via it's Microsoft Visual C++ distrubutables (as one example). Likewise, there's forwards compatibility issues on Windows as well (if you build a program in Windows 11 you'll have a hard time running that on windows XP/Vista for a huge number of reasons).

If you build a statically linked program with only glibc dynamically linked, and you do that on Linux from 2005,then that program should run exactly the same today on Linux. The same is true for Windows software.

[vlovich123]

Im pretty sure it’s safe to distribute Windows 11 built binaries to windows 7 and windows 10 if it’s a valid target set in Visual Studio. The c++ runtime is its own thing because of a combination of c++ BS (no stable runtime) and c++ isn’t an official part of Windows. It’s a developer tool they offer. But you can statically link the c++ runtime in which case you can build with the latest runtime on Windows 11 and distribute to an older Windows.

Linux is the only space where you have to literally do your build on an old snapshot of a distro with an old glibc so that you can distribute said software. If you’re in c++ land you’re in for a world of hurt because the version of the language is now constrained to whatever was available at the time that old distro from 5+ years ago snapshotted unless you build a newer compiler yourself from scratch. With Rust at least this is much easier since they build their toolchain on an old version of Linux and thus their binaries are similarly easily distributed and the latest Rust compiler is trivially easy to obtain on old Linux distros.

Source: I’m literally doing this today for my day job

[account42]

You can also build a cross-compiler to target an older glibc, you are not limited to the distro-provided toolchain. This also allows to to use newer C++ features (with exceptions) as those mostly depend on the GCC version and not glibc version. Of course the supported range of glibc version varies with gcc version, just like visual studio doesn't support XP anymore - the difference is that if you are sufficiently motivated you can patch gcc.

[int_19h]

Flatpaks aren't distro specific.

As for being overkill, surely you can see the advantage of having a single uniform distribution format from the end user's perspective? Which, sure, might be overkill for your case (although app isolation isn't just about dependencies), but the important thing is that it is a working solution that you can use, and users only need to know how to install and manage them.

[vlovich123]

You have to install the flat pack runtime to begin with so that’s one obstacle for distribution. And it also doesn’t really isolate as much as you’d like to believe - eg dealing with audio will still be a mess because there’s like 4 different major audio interfaces. And now I have to host a flat pack repo and get the user to add my repo if it’s proprietary software. It’s really nowhere near as smooth and simple as on Windows/Mac/Android/ios.

[int_19h]

> You have to install the flat pack runtime to begin with so that’s one obstacle for distribution.

Only if you're using a distro that doesn't come with it preinstalled. But that doesn't make it distro-specific?

> And now I have to host a flat pack repo and get the user to add my repo if it’s proprietary software.

You don't have to do that, you can just give them a .flatpak file to install: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/single-file-bundles.html

The reason to host a repo regardless is to enable easy auto-updates - and I don't think you can call this bit "smooth and simple" on Windows and Mac, what with most apps each doing their own thing for updates. Unless you use the app store, but then that's exactly the same as repos...