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Comment by mongol | Hacker News Reader

> But there was no one to coordinate Linux on desktop.

Freedesktop.org?

I get the impression that some people don't want to participate in FreeDesktop. Maybe they see it as bloated or too aligned with GNOME.

Yes. GNOME and KDE at least coordinate via freedesktop.org. At least they did!

Those are for DEs.

For end-user application, it's a mess. You can't compile once and run everywhere.

LSB (Linux Standard Base) tried to that and failed.

flatpak/Snap/AppImage all tried to that, each have its own set of problems.

Can you compile on windows11 and run it on windows xp? Yeah didn't think so

You can do this even with the official Microsoft SDKs (just need to have the XP targeting pack). And then there are numerous third party development tools that allow this.

You can do this on linux too, make a chroot, done.

Windows doesn’t need a chroot and a separate install base. You can build one binary for Longhorn, using the Windows 11 SDK, and it will run on everything from NT4 to 11 without modification.

*assuming you wrote it in such a way to be able to do it

Yeah, and then hope that the tools that you need to build even run on some ancient glibc version.

Stuff like innosetup?

Unless you choose to use APIs that aren't in Windows XP, then this isn't a problem. Win32 backwards compatibility is very impressive.

Building a Win16 application would be more difficult.

But this isn't directly comparable. The issue with Linux is getting a precompiled binary to work properly across all currently up to date distributions.

> For end-user application, it's a mess. You can't compile once and run everywhere.

Yes you can, you said it yourself: flatpak, snap, and appimage.

Okay okay, those technologies have problems. But all technologies do. That's why Microsoft has half a dozen GUI frameworks and then they build their own in-house applications in Electron :P

I’m still mad they stole the scriptable, composable DCOP and put it all behind a binary format.

whatever happened with kdbus btw?

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