> Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions.

... Even for desktop Linux users? I can't say I've felt it. I switched almost 4 years ago and it just keeps feeling better and better (in a "Luigi wins by doing nothing" kind of way).

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cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Linux desktops (not the kernel) are actually among the worst when it comes to platform churn. It's one of the reasons why Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, etc require relatively complex machinery and runtimes and whatnot to function. The churn is just masked by package managers.

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zahlman an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It's come across to me so far that this just results from application developers targeting a specific DE and not really thinking about compatibility, or even really whether they need specific functionality provided a specific way.

Would be nice to see the XDG stuff like portals etc. better respected, though, yeah.

	▲	cosmic_cheese 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		DE stuff is part of the picture, but there’s churn outside of those too. glibc, which is used in practically everything, is the classic example but across the whole of the Linux desktop sphere, it’s unusual for libraries to maintain compatibility. The only reason why Linux desktops work at all is thanks to package managers and their maintainers doing the heavy lifting of keeping applications and the libraries they use in lockstep. If it weren’t for that random programs would be breaking every other update.

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fragmede 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

if snaps were masked by apt, there wouldn't be such an objection to them.