Such as defending the bundling of modified libs, thus making it hard (if not impossible) to package for various distros.
And rather than noticing this as being very similar to what he has ranted about others doing in the past in userspace, he joins in attacking said distros...
Edit (because apparently i am "posting too fast"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_(software)
See the last few parts, and citenotes 9 and 10.
What he's talking about is on the video above and it's a very reasonable point. I just released a game with Linux support and most of the bug reports I got were from people running the game on different distributions and random libraries not being the version you would expect it to be. This is not to mention that I got way more bug reports from Linux users than Windows users, despite Linux users making up 2%-3% of the playerbase. His point is absolutely valid and not at all a "serious idiocy".
I am asking this because just yesterday, I tried to run the steam streaming client and it kept crashing. As far as I can tell, because it must have been compiled with a different compiler or glibc than the rest of my system.
In fact, with closed source software I see a lot of problems in the Linux space which could be solved by recompiling, but that simply isn't possible. The reason behind all this is probably that Linux systems are just not build for closed source software as the devs keep changing things which would be required for that (e.g. stable ABIs).
Btw. does anybody know if there are tools out there to obfuscate code for games, so that they could release their code in a form which some distribution could compile, but which is too obfuscated for someone else to make use of it (e.g. steal the game)?
Microsoft is backwards compatible to an insane degree. Which gives you stability but not consistency.
OSX is consistent but Apple throws out backwards compatible features every other year, so not really stable.
But for users, it doesn't help if you bought a tool last year and it gets non functional because Apple removed or tightened down a function in their OS.
You can only hope than that the developers are still around and update it if that's even possible.
I think its significantly holding back desktop and laptop adoption. Besides all the distros and multiple desktop environments, all these permutations seems like its holding back applications. I use a cluster compute environment but my client is a mac. If apple can make a "unix" that runs applications well, why can't linux. (I can't code it but I would buy it)
I don't want a separate vm or container for each app I run.
I've started distributing an exact version of boost and gmp with my programs and refusing to accept bug reports generated from using other versions. Life is too short (when unpaid) for the pain caused by exactly the problems Linus is describing.
As far as I'm concerned, choosing AppImage is just more evidence that Linus is a smart and practical dude who makes reasonable decisions.
Incorrect. AppImage is used to distribute Linus's Subsurface in distro-agnostic manner, by packaging all needed libraries with the binary.
Even Linus gives his endorsement, "This is just very cool." so that means a lot.
I know people find it uncomfortable or rude, but I think its a necessary feature of a great leader when dealing with an unruly mass of, generally speaking, mostly arrogant, mostly privileged individuals.