The purpose of the article was never to explain the exact operation in detail. It isn’t a blueprint; it’s an advocacy paper. Please don’t read more into my words than I intended. I’m not asking anyone to change anything. I’m inviting people to contribute ideas and help build this project voluntarily, according to their own interests and preferences. Clearly, this isn’t for you.

I’m clearly advocating for an open platform with compatibility in the article.

It isn’t a rare example. That “one example” (which isn’t even accurate) represents one example too many, first of all. Look at the contribution history yourself: you’ll find many cases where changes broke things because the affected code was 7–10 years old.

There’s a reason Windows maintains near-total backward compatibility: a ten-year-old line of code may still be performing essential work, and there’s no inherent need to remove it. Your standards for what qualifies as acceptable deprecation are subjective, but the broader world expects software to maintain compatibility for decades.

This isn’t a forum for throwing quick witted gotchas. I’m trying to have a constructive discussion. at any case, it’s because I’m working to build an open platform with proper backward compatibility, so please engage seriously rather than trolling.

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying you’re jumping to conclusions too quickly.

I had a long discussion about this yesterday, so I didn’t want to repeat the same arguments all over again. At this point, it feels like I’m encountering the same arguments across different platforms.

Maybe I should add a Q&A section to the article to clarify my points. Many people have raised interesting perspectives, not because I haven’t considered them, but because I have a particular viewpoint that I didn’t fully explain in the article itself.

EDIT: at any case, to engage with your points: To you, these problems are solved, or nonexistent because you are comfortable using Linux in this specific way. but it is not ready as it is for the wider world outside of the people who are comfortable with the existing levels of compatibility it offers, which isn’t much compared to Windows. Also, I am not just offering better compatibility, but a better packaging and distribution model as well. and an over all more polished experience, though the latter wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the article, it is implicit.

I am not talking about the kernel. and the userspace of either platform is nowhere near as strong as it is on Windows.

There are many problems with existing solutions, I’ve already had a long discussion on this on the subreddit. and I went in more detail in the conversation. check it out if you’re interested.

Your comment reduces my article to vague claims of ignorance and a basic mention of something you admittedly only glanced on. The article is much richer in depth than your comment suggests, I encourage people here to actually read it so we can have a proper discussion. I promise you that it won’t disappoint even if you don’t agree fully with it.

You’re playing a bit of a fool. I’m talking about this: https://x.com/Plagman2/status/1559683905904463873 and the many examples I’ve personally seen of random “contributors” removing clearly critical infrastructure from glibc.

I think you’ve gotten a really bad read of my article. We know the typical Linux stack has problems with libraries failing to maintain backward compatibility and even when they do, the guarantees are nowhere near as strong or long-lasting as on Windows.

The problem is ultimately cultural. My article is essentially an appeal to anyone willing and capable of building a sane userspace through a single distribution. If that distribution adopts the stack, others can copy it or diverge at their own cost.

As for separating the userspace from regular applications, the point is that the OS shouldn’t treat system packages and user packages as the same thing. That’s separation of concerns, not a contradiction.

Why has there been recent issues with compatibility with the userspace then? from systemd to even not so distant news of glibc failing? The article goes a bit more in depth about what needs to be done, it describes a different packaging and distribution model as well that is simpler and more convenient in design.