578
Linux surpasses the Mac among Steam gamers
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is actually awesome to see. Sadly the main thing holding Linux back is still just momentum. And for a lot of people MS word. Even if the free suites are pretty good nowadays.
There are many things which are holding mass Linux adoption: hardware comparability, too many distros, hard to find and install software (no one cares about your package manager), lack of proprietary software, the list goes on. A lot of that could be resolved by third party developers, but Linux is a moving target and software development is a nightmare.
Could you clarify what you mean with this?
Not the person you're replying to, but Linux has long had a policy of "F backwards compatibility" in the userspace. Try running a 10 year old binary on the current version of a distro. Try a 5 year old binary. Chances are, it's not going to work, or you're going to go through dependency hell trying to get the correct library versions for that old binary.
But notice how Windows 11 can run a Windows XP app.
That's the problem. Most users aren't going to want to compile from source, assuming the software they're trying to use is even open source. Hell, nvidia users constantly have driver issues because the binary blobs must be updated to continue working after kernel updates. And that's not to mention all the competing package managers and distro quirks with library versions and naming.
You can run 16 bit Windows 3.0 apps on Windows 10 on compatible hardware. Can I run any Linux application compiled 20+ years ago on any modern distro without any fuckery? No. I can't even run apps compiled for the latest Arch on the latest Ubuntu, lol. Software development for Linux is a total nightmare.
This is true, but kind of exaggerated. I can't run some windows 7 apps on Windows 10. I have been able to run some backalley Linux software from an html 1.0 site designed in the 90's no problem.
On both platforms backwards compatibility is a little hit or miss, but yeah Linux is worse.
Yes, some apps might not run. Yet some Win16 do actually run on Windows 10.