Hacker News Reader

> I don't think that is correct. Do you have an example? Linus is adament that "[they] do not break userspace".

I think you interpreted Linus wrong. When he says "we do not break userspace" he is talking about the Kernel APIs that are exposed to the Userland.

Userland APIs would be stuff like glibc, which has a terrible track record in regards to API breakage.

The statement "Linux does not have a stable userland ABI/API" is about the kernel. If you are talking about glibc you are already in the Linux OS/GNU Linux (whatever it is called) domain.

I think I correctly interpreted Linus when he talked about the kernel API/ABI facing the user (developer of application).

A lot of trouble you are going to get maintaining builds are due to poor tooling, not linux.

But we are getting into semantics here. At the end of the day, I think that if you are careful with what you are doing and think a little before choosing your tools and writing code, you should get very good mileage out of your linux binaries.

I don't know enough about windows to comment on its stability but I very much doubt I could just slide my original Quake CD or 3DS max 4 install into Windows 10. But I might be wrong!

>But that would be the same thing on windows. If you dynamically link your executable to an old version of libcurl and run your executable on a windows with a newer version containing a breaking change, you'll be in trouble, whatever your OS.

Most of the time I can run a program from the 1990s on Windows 11 just fine, you can't say the same for Linux.

The only incompatibility in Windows that happens frequently is if you try to run a program written for a newer Windows version in an older version. That will likely fail because forwards compatiblity isn't a priority. But with regards to backwards compatiblity, Microsoft goes to herculean efforts to make sure Windows programs written several decades ago will work today.

If you statically link to your dependencies or ship the dynamic libraries yourself, like you would need to do on windows, you would get the exact same experience on Linux.

The kernel shouldn't break user space but glibc, Qt, GTK, etc. any upgrade of the most common dependencies will break programs without at least recompiling them.

Windows programs ship with all their necessary libraries and/or link against the Microsoft c++ resist packages and you can have many different versions installed. Your MSI installer has to install the libcurl.3.dll instead of it being shared with other programs.

Docker and Flatpak fix the userland part the kernel part is already stable by "definition". Stuff may still break overtime but no more than it does on MacOS and Window. It's not broken by design anymore.