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Top-level
 @eevee @Tvorsk the underlying problem is "Linux userspace keeps breaking its ABI". there are several ways to deal with it, including "bundle almost the entire userspace or literally all of it in some cases" (snap, AppImage) or "build against an ABI that doesn't break" (wine) I don't think anymore that shipping a relatively simple GUI application in a way that works and keeps working on a broad range of Linux systems is a task a single person can reasonably manage, which is a problem 10 comments
 @whitequark @eevee @Tvorsk I mean, there is definitely something very important to learn from the fact that people are so desperate for a stable ABI and environment that they think Win32 will do, actually. @whitequark @Tvorsk "bundle almost the entire userspace" is what half of windows software does anyway, and as you are pointing out there is infrastructure developing around doing it on linux, so i don't know why you're saying it like it's wildly unreasonable for an external binary release @whitequark @Tvorsk but also this thread was originally about video games which often do not have any native gui whatsoever @hierarchon @Tvorsk @whitequark that's a weird comparison since you can install multiple versions of an .so but not multiple versions of a python library  @eevee @Tvorsk @whitequark most distributions that I've used only let you install one version of a package; you can have libfoo3 and libfoo4, but that assumes breakage only happens on major version changes @eevee @Tvorsk I think it's perfectly reasonable for a binary release of software to bundle the entire userspace (and rely on the kernel's ABI and, probably, X11's stability). this has significant costs, such as "you may have to bundle nvidia's proprietary drivers and that's quite difficult" or "your software can't natively pick up wayland because you ship ancient libSDL and never update". or you could use WinAPI as your ABI, which doesn't have those issues, but has some of its own |
Gregory's Server
@eevee @Tvorsk (or the cursed thing I did with wasm that I mentioned earlier)
my position on this issue is informed specifically by extensively using Linux and shipping Linux software. it is and will remain my primary system, and the fact that I, as a Linux developer, have an easier time shipping software to macOS and Windows is absurd.