• TCB13@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Half of the success of Windows and macOS is the fact that they provide solid and stable APIs and development tools that “makes it easy” to develop to those platforms. Linux is very bad at that. If major pieces of an OS are constantly changing and it requires large re-works of the applications then developers are less likely to support it. To be fair the Linux situation might be even harder than that - there are no distribution “sponsored” IDE (like Visual Studio or Xcode) and userland API documentation, frameworks etc.

    • smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de
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      9 months ago

      Yep, this is one of the most common disadvantage of Linux ecosystem. Unless using something like Debian, but then comes (a little, but still existing) fragmentation.

      My comment is about proprietary apps here. The biggest roadblockers with any change to next-gen technologies in the stack like Flatpak, Pipewire, Wayland, etc. are always them. Because with FOSS when someone create a new store or tech, they can be the ones doing ports of common apps, but with locked down software all he can do is please the original developers - the only ones able to do what they want with the program.

      • TCB13@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        My comment is about proprietary apps here. The biggest roadblockers with any change to next-gen technologies

        Yes, but those proprietary apps provide good features, support and have tons of hours of dev time and continuous updates that the FOSS alternatives can’t just match. We need that software as much as we need FOSS.

        with FOSS when someone create a new store or tech, they can be the ones doing ports of common apps,

        This isn’t true. Linux was the worst track ever of supporting old software, even worse than Apple. Rewriting applications for the latest version of GNOME doesn’t count as “support older software”, counts only as a pain in the ass that makes Linux unattractive to professionally developed / non FOSS software - after all who wants to constantly spend time updating an app just because the GNOME team decided to reinvent the wheel again to no marginal gain?

        • smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de
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          9 months ago

          There unfortunetly is something to it, like shown by some game developers dropping Linux port when Proton got good enough and just officially supporting the game to work with Proton.