The caveat is, there's no common baseline for libraries. Graphics libraries, the libc itself, GUI widget libraries etc. will appear in different version combinations in different distributions, since they have different release schedules.
So if you want to go the Windows/MacOS route and ship a readily compiled program for Linux, you have to vendor in a loooot more libraries, and they have a higher risk of breaking due to incompatibilities (kernel interface for your graphics driver changed, configuration file syntax for your font renderer changed, etc.)
Flatpaks/snaps try to solve this (poorly) by vendoring the entire kitchen sink and then some, which just creates more bloat and a worse DLL hell than Windows could ever have dreamed of. So using it for everything isn't really feasible still.
Simply don't vendor glibc and graphics drivers and you will be fine. Vendoring drivers doesn't make sense anyway as your application will be obsolete by the next HW cycle.
And there is a lot of more obscure examples: fontconfig e.g. at some point changed their config file format in a not backwards compatible way, and now some Steam games crash on startup because the developers earlier vendored it to get around its ABI breaking repeatedly.
And that sort of software doesn't really obsolete. Steam and GoG allow games to have a 10+ years long tail of slow but steady sales that don't really justify constant maintenance releases but still both let people enjoy good games (those don't really obsolete), and serve as advertisement for the developers' newer games.
Neither of this is true.
> And there is a lot of more obscure examples: fontconfig e.g. at some point changed their config file format in a not backwards compatible way, and now some Steam games crash on startup because the developers earlier vendored it to get around its ABI breaking repeatedly.
Bundling fontconfig but not it's internal config is retarded, yes. Really, games have no business looking at system fonts at all.
upstream didn't build with all the dependencies at the same version as the latest in the arch repo. Nor are most upstream developers bumping all their dependency versions constantly
if you're a big player like ubuntu/debian you can go to the authors/upstream and ask them to fix the program to work with their dependency versions (in say.. an LTS release). most would be glad to bc it's just something upstream needs to do once every couple years and doesn't need maintenance. If even thats too much and yyou want esomething even more handsoff/timeless then you make an Appimage. It'll work for ever
With Arch youd need to constantly monitor the thing doesn't break？Are they just #yolo'ing dependency versions most of the time ？ (itd prolly work 99% of the time..)
Right now e.g. there's openssl (still at version 3.0.x, because nobody supports 3.1.x yet) and openssl-1.1 (1.1.x-y) to handle the rather slow migration of upstreams to the new major release.
You're expected to run most apps as flatpaks.
It's probably one of the most solid Linux distros at the moment and their website makes it seem.. boring.. No screenshots, features, mentions of whats available (like apps), that Fedora uses newer graphics/drivers kernels, that you can run Steam, that apps are sandboxed etc.
Stark contrast to something like https://vanillaos.org/
Honestly, if you just want the naked OS, you don't need a distro at all.
Or just don't use the package manager.
And to a degree, the line is blurry with Windows as well, what with how deep MSVC/win32 is integrated into the system. .NET took decades to dis-entangle itself from Windows and become a proper standalone platform, and Microsoft's attempts at getting people to use UWP instead of win32 is ongoing and not very successful so far.
Interesting. It never occurred to me that there's a blurry line between the two. It seems to me that there's a very hard line between the two. I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here.
> For example, installing a C# or Go compiler on Linux is great with a package manager. But doing the same with a C or Python is different?
I'm confused by this question, so forgive me if this answer isn't really addressing it. A package manager is a convenience, nothing more. Using one means makes your life easier in a number of ways. But not using one isn't really that much more difficult. Package managers are 100% optional.
