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int_19h 8 hours ago

> What is X11, Wayland, GNOME, KDE, d-bus, application ids, portals, etc. ... Compare that to developing for Windows, where most things "just work"

This is a weird complaint, and I'm saying this as a mostly-Windows developer. Windows has an insane number of technologies, many of them replacements for older replacements for older replacements ... etc going 30+ years back. Do you know how registration-free COM works, for example? Probably not, yet it is there, and if you go to the Windows section of MSDN and just start reading through the docs, you'll have to read through that too.

You can reasonably argue that it's not a thing that you actually need to know to write an app for Windows, and it's true. But similarly you don't actually need to know what d-bus is, never mind how it works, to write an app for Linux. If you use a reasonably high-level framework such as Qt, it takes care of all that for you. Hell, you can even go for .NET Core + Avalonia to get something very similar to WPF on Windows.

And then there's Electron, which lets you pretend that everything is just a browser...

Nah, writing the apps for Linux isn't difficult at all. OTOH you're right in that distribution is a pain, and end-user support across numerous wildly different distros can also be a pain (especially when they start packaging a patched version of your code in their package repos!).