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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

This is a flaw in Linux Desktops' choice of application management paradigms, which insists that everything be tightly coupled and managed. It is entirely possible and reasonable to have a stable set of base system libraries everyone can depend on and otherwise applications must bring their own.

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It's not just possible and reasonable. It's how literally every other platform works.

It's also how the Linux Standard Base worked. It was intended to be a stable well-defined backwards-compatible set of libraries common across distributions. Of course the LSB had its share of problems but they had the right idea to bring stability to Linux as a platform for binary apps.

Eh, it doesn't really work for a volunteer based projects. It's already hard to find people that want to fix bugs in open software, it would be even harder to find someone willing to fix it in a version 10 years old and then have them verify it working in all possible cases without regression.

NixOS manages this, it's entirely possible to use the stable channel for system packages but subscribe to the unstable channel for packages installed per-user.

Of course, NixOS also has atomic upgrades and rollback, so there's not much risk just running unstable everywhere

Agreed whole-heartedly, and one of the reasons I love the FreeBSD model. My ideal Linux distro would be the inverse of Debian k/FreeBSD – a Linux kernel with FreeBSD kernel interfaces provided by loadable module and a FreeBSD-style userland.

Might be possible soon, now that building Linux with clang is supported.

Huh. There are already others implementing the Linux ABI, but I can only think of NetBSD rump kernels and some Plan 9 thing...vx9? going the other way. No reason it shouldn't work.

Edit: Oh, and Darling runs Darwin binaries on Linux, which isn't quite a BSD but is non-Linux

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