It's Linux's failure that one of the world's biggest corporations outspent it on marketing by orders of magnitude? You can sell crap like hotcakes with enough money and advertising minds. Yours isn't really an argument for Linux APIs being any worse or better quality.

> Linux adopted Win32 because it actually worked.

WINE would have been invented one way or another because enough people would have wanted to run Windows programs on Linux in a world where Linux had dominant market share. For Pete's sake, there are Commodore 64 emulators for Linux in a world where that system has been dead for decades. It has nothing to do with what "works" or not. WINE and Proton are developed as actively as they are today because Microslop has been able to market so effectively to convince average joes and businesss leaders to buy their crappy OS. This has nothing to do with the quality of APIs.

> They could have simply invented a better API that didn't suck.

Is there ever a situation where this statement isn't true? Everything built in software can be seen as sucking, and all software could have been written better the first time around.

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lenkite 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> It's Linux's failure that one of the world's biggest corporations outspent it on marketing by orders of magnitude?

No, It is Linux's severe failure that it lacked a singular, stable, and unified userspace GUI API.

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	▲	adithyassekhar 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> No, It is Linux's severe failure that it lacked a singular, stable, and unified userspace GUI API. Careful, some people are too hell bend on idealogies than making a reliable product. They'd never understand this. This is one of the reasons why open source (free as in beer) will never work for anything serious. When my work depends upon a software someone made for free, there's an unnecessary power dynamic in play where since I didn't pay for it, they can rugpull me anytime. Before someone comes with the argument of forking, that's not how an economy works. I can't be the farmer, the truck driver, the salesman and sometimes even the buyer at the same time. The kernel doesn't owe anything to the distros, which is insane, distros doesn't owe anything to the various libraries and vice versa, none of them owes anything to the application developers. It's a boat where each person is rowing in their own direction because they don't care what others does with their code and they don't have to. Because they are working for FREE®. The effects of this is catastrophic. Everytime I try to switch, I can't find a single userspace application that works half as good as windows applications. People need incentives to make their work good, no one does anything for free. Free just means it sucks. If microsoft/apple/google tomorrow releases their own distro, every single one will abandon their flavor of the week arch/ubuntu/mint/fedora for that one. One that's made by people in exchange for money. I bet the ubuntu developers use macbooks.