The state of binary compatibility on Linux and how to address it

I think the problem is that people treat Linux as OS instead of just a kernel.

You should assume every Linux distro is a different OS so when you are shipping your app for Linux you're actually shipping your app for Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu etc

That's the sane way to tackle it. If you're the vendor, just target the top N (whatever value of N you can cope with).

I don't mean disrespect towards people running Alpine (hi), Arch, or Gentoo, but you wouldn't be running these distros if you aren't ready to handle their quirks.

TFA mostly talks about binary compat. Even if you can get away with statically linking everything, you still have to cope with the mess that is userspace fragmentation: <https://tailscale.com/blog/sisyphean-dns-client-linux>

So yeah, supporting the top N gets you approximately sqrt(N/(N+1))% of the way. (Assuming desktop Linux market share is about 1%.)

>I don't mean disrespect towards people running Alpine (hi), Arch, or Gentoo, but you wouldn't be running these distros if you aren't ready to handle their quirks.

You'd think so, but you'd be surprised how many gamers switching from Windows to Linux get recommended Arch and Manjaro

I see Bazzite recommended more than Arch these days, but Arch is confusingly a very popular choice.

I wonder if Arch being the basis for SteamOS is responsible.

This is definitely the root of it. Linux isn't the OS, your distro is.

Somewhere along the way we seem to have collectively forgotten that the distro, via it's package manager, is responsible for delivering software, ensuring compatibility, and integrating it all - at least for open source software. That was one of Debian's biggest selling points "back in the day" - that they had a huge repository and big team of maintainers packaging everything under the sun so it works on Debian.

Now we have app image, flatpak, snap, etc. All means of getting developers to ship binaries directly to users, bypassing the package managers, instead of shipping code to distros, but we shouldn't expect devs to ship to the 100s of different OSes in this ecosystem. They ship the code, distros pick it up (or don't) and make it work on their distro.

The shift to direct-to-user binaries doesn't make sense for OSS. It should be packaged by the distro, not the dev (of course, the devs can help with packaging if they are so inclined).

Obviously this doesn't apply to proprietary software, but like you said, you can just target on of the LTS enterprise distros and get a well-defined, stable base (for 10 years with Ubuntu and Red hat).