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this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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And that fight against closed-source and anti-consumer shit is awesome, but that changes absolutely nothing about Linux being completely awful in terms of long-term support. Running old software is a whole project (for enthusiasts) in itself almost every single time, meanwhile I can run almost any decade-old software on systems like Android or Windows simply by installing it without having to be an IT professional.
Except that this causes usability issues for the 99.99% of users who aren't that little Timmy you just made up, and it causes accessibility tools which are freaking essential for many people to simply break. Old games becoming unplayable isn't an issue only because of their Windows versions and Wine, dxvk etc - we literally have to fall back to Windows software to keep software running because of how badly the Linux system architecture works for desktop usage. What a disgrace.
Literally has nothing to do with Linux' own problems.
Linux's own problems is that we have a culture of "tear everything down and make way for progress", which I personally approve of. However, things keep getting left behind in the rebuilding process and that's a very real cultural problem. We should have been rebuilding those accessibility tools with everything else and the reason we haven't is that quite frankly the linux community itself hates disabled people.
I see no other reason that disabled people would be relying on old and unmaintained code in the first place. That's not a problem with the build and rebuild attitude, that's a problem of who we accept into the community. Why is the only wheelchair accessible building 20 years old and full of rotting floorboards?
Linux is built by the community and always does what it thinks is best for the community. The fact that "what's best" does not include maintaining the accessibility features is fucking deplorable and that's a legitimate thing to complain about. But a system shouldn't need to support legacy junk just to provide accesibility features that should have been core parts of the system from the beginning. In that, no linux developer has the right to look a microslop developer in the eye.
I think it's slowly getting better though, more people are finally listening. At least that's what I notice; still, those purists who don't give a proper shit ("The CLI is perfectly accessible! It's all text, where's the problem?") and believe everyone got to be a developer or filtered out are really loud and annoying.
Of course the system should inherently be accessible. Better backwards compatibility would just make a lot of things simpler, even if what's being made simpler is to deal with bad decisions and exclusion. Enabling people (everyone, not just abled or developers) is always good.
Android is Linux! You're running your decades old software, on Linux. What was the last completely unmaintained binary that you pulled on Windows and ran (with no tweaking) and the last one that failed on Linux?
Why do you keep sharing that link instead of this one? https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love-me-back-post-4-wayland-is-growing-up-and-now-we-dont-have-a-choice/ The one where the same person you've been posting says clearly people are working on accessibility and things are improving?
Have you considered joining the community and working with it -- like the author of the blog that you keep sharing -- instead of trying to insult every one who works on it and calling it a disgrace?
That's a rabbit hole of semantics I'm not going down. π I think it's clear we are talking about Desktop Linux, which is very different to Android.
Ouff, didn't use Windows (10) for years. Probably either Photoshop CS6 or one of my old favs like Total Annihilation (1998). On Linux the last app that failed also happened to be a (native) game, Life is Strange: Before the Storm. I saw someone fixed it with a glibc shim, and a friend likes that game.
Because I'm complaining about puritans and Linux-bros who keep sugarcoating real problems that exist for a long time now, or even still make a fuss about things like systemd or Flatpak (which solve a lot of long lasting issues). That blogpost is a perfect example of this. I said it in my first comment, "Puritans on Linux are a real menace". Everything after that is merely me putting my finger into open wounds (which are being worked on by devs and I'm absolutely celebrating that, please don't get me wrong!) which are regularly being sugarcoated by those people.
It wasn't my intention to insult any dev working in these issues, if it sounds like that I'm genuinely sorry. I'm mad about puritans who behave as if Desktop Linux is a silver bullet for long-term app support or people like Semperservus who think it's a good thing non-devs (and those who simply don't have time to invest that time into their computer) are being "filtered out". And if someone sugarcoats big issues like how Linux systems historically handled packages and dependencies and the problems it causes I'll use strong words to make abundantly clear how wrong they are, because I'm fed up by this willful ignorance.
(Same willful ignorance in my opinion is the reason why accessibility deteriorated to the current degree since we once had that part figured out. That's why I used is as argument)
This is not semantics at all. You earlier say that Linux not having a stable ABI is the cause of a ton of problems.
Android doesn't make any more Linux ABI guarantees than anyone else: because it's using the Linux kernel. I can easily compile a program targeting a generic aarch64 with a static musl C and run the binary on Android. So no, it isn't semantics, it is good proof that you're not correct in claiming that Linux ABI stability is terrible. Maybe you're using the term "Linux ABI" more loosely than everyone else, but that's not "just semantics", the Linux ABI is a well defined concept and the parts of it that are stable are well defined.
The very first line of your blog post that you shared. That has nothing do do with Linux ABI stability, or honestly even glibc ABI stability, if you're going to use symbols that are explicitly internal you can't get annoyed when they change..? That's a terrible example.
Adobe still shipped CS6 until 2017, so it's 9 years old. That's not particularly ancient, and it's backed by.. well Adobe. They have a bit of money. [EDIT: https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/cs6-install-instructions.html actually it's still available on their site so.. I wouldn't expect any issues]
Did you run Total Annihilation through Steam? I found this link https://steamcommunity.com/app/298030/discussions/0/1353742967805047388/ and people even had to modify things that way. It's very impressive that it runs at all and yes, Windows is most definitely the king of backwards compatibility. Or at least it used to be, I'm happy to know very little about modern Windows, and it's definitely not backwards compatible with hardware...
The person who wrote the "filtered out comment" was batshit crazy and clearly didn't even know what they were talking about. "Stable ABIs are what lead to corpo-capital interests infecting every single piece of technology and chaining us to their systems via vendor lock-in" is one of the most nonsense statements I've read on Lemmy. I wish I had more downvotes available.
It's important to remember that the Linux kernel has millions of dollars and full time devs from companies like Google and Microsoft working on it. The Linux Desktop space does not have that. Like at all. Linux Desktop is predominantly a volunteer project. Valve has started putting money into it which is great, but that's very recent.