I hope you can see that "keep libraries backwards compatible forever" is not really a good option either and is probably orders of magnitude more work than just doing all the things you said. In some situations, it is also impossible: if there are bugs in the API contract then it has to be broken eventually.
> I hope you can see that "keep libraries backwards compatible forever" is not really a good option
??? Why would I be able to see that? You've given zero explanation or evidence for why that would be the case. I see a whole lot of people in this thread in addition to the article explaining why backwards compatibility is good. Nobody is giving valid reasons as to why it's bad.
Microsoft has managed to keep the whole Win32 API compatible "forever". GUI apps built for Windows 95 still work out of the box on Windows 10. Backwards compatibility is a major part of why they are still the dominant platform: businesses actually care about this. They use ancient proprietary software that is critical to their business whose source code has long been lost to the sands of time. A platform that breaks their software is no platform at all.
> probably orders of magnitude more work than just doing all the things you said.
Really? How hard is it to not break things?
It's sometimes more work to add new features or support new hardware without breaking the ABI but clearly it's feasible. glibc 2.1 was released in 1999 and the maintainers decided at that point that they would preserve backwards compatibility forever. We're now at 22 years without a major ABI break. There have been some hiccups of course (the memcpy() fiasco) but they've been fixed.
The GCC team have decided to follow in their footsteps. Since version 5 they've decided they're not going to break the libstdc++ ABI anymore. The culture of backwards compatibility is finally growing on the Linux desktop. This is a far better solution than Flatpak.
Glibc isn't really a good example, that has a ton of unfortunate broken APIs that should probably be removed entirely (the most notorious example probably being gets) but never will be, and I suspect they will continue to be a source of bugs as long as applications use them and aren't patched. I mean the whole reason musl exists is to get away from some of these maintenance issues in glibc.
The difference is that Windows applications historically shipped with the appropriate version of the C++ runtime bundled in (and there wa no guarantee that one was provided by the OS), while Linux app usually rely on the system .so.