I'm not defending this but there was (or has been) enough political motivation and intentionality in GNU/Linux systems to make binary compatibility a hassle. People actually made decisions against backwards compatible APIs, intending to cause issues and forcing open-sourcing.

Binary compatibility means closed source has a chance to grow in an ecosystem. It requires "responsible" developers to put more effort into designing APIs and keeping them alive. It adds complexity that requires a more stable set of long-term developers; in contrast, the constant churn in FOSS requires lower barriers for contributions. With stable APIs/ABIs you have to live with decade-long mistakes. You cannot "just fix it" in a next major bump.

> First of all you HAVE to ship the source code if you want it to keep working on every machine because people need to compile it on their machine for it to work, so you're practically forced to open source your desktop app. I know the notion of having a closed source app on Linux sounds weird, but it's more weird that this isn't an option as a side-effect of the how the whole system is designed.

That's so very not true.

Most Linux distros allows for custom repositories. So you can just setup the build infrastructure on your side and then have the users include your repos on their side. No need to open source code and users have painless update notifications.

> It's only on Linux that I feel like the developer is pressured to open source it and make it the user's problem because the system won't provide support.

Lots of users have never seen the source code of their software, they just get the binary package. The pressure you're talking about is imaginary.

This is downright misinformation. There are no 100kb Windows programs that work for 20 years. Every single program on Windows ships half of the system libraries again, just for use by itself. Microsoft couldn't be bothered to version their libc at the beginning ffs.

WINE is often somewhat jokingly called a more stable platform for Windows programs than Windows is but there's truth there.

CMake support in Qt is perfectly fine nowadays. There are some (optional) custom commands you can use, but generally it's just plain CMake.

So, your critique of Gtk sounds convincing, but about Qt, you seem to be admitting they're offering a less-horrible way to build than how things used to be.

I looked at this: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/cmake-get-started.html ... and I'll admit they seem to be hiding some nasty stuff under the hood. But it still seems workable. I guess the devil is in the details?

GIMP itself is 62MB on my host, I'm not sure what kind of hello world you're building that's 3x that size.

Take a good look around and check how often people do really change computer platform. And you already have so many things that are different that the "same look" is just an excuse. Gnome, KDE, macOS, Windows does not have the same UX in their file explorer which is a basic utility that everyone has to use. Same with connecting to a WiFi and creating a new user account.

So why would you want Discord to be consistent, when you're mostly using the same desktop (or switch between at most two) for hours.

The thing is when HIG were followed instead of everyone trying to create their "brand", everyone knows where the common actions were. You learned the platform and then can use any app. With the new trend, you would only have one computer, but any new app is a new puzzle to figure out.

The best way I’ve seen this implemented is having the domain be a library or a protocol/server. For a lot of saas, we already have people writing the mobile versions and the web version..

Yes. It’s more work than dumping Electron on users. Quality often is.

What is native on Windows too. These days the term native app is so confused it's hard to come up with a definition that doesn't include electron.

athena[0], take it or leave it

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Athena_Widgets

TUIs, apparently. :)