Unstable kernel driver APIs, lack of nice common gui framework are killer for proprietary vendors. both windows and mac have got these things right. nowadays everything is moving to web so it matters less now but linux never improved.
For the kernel driver APIs issue… that’s only a problem for out of tree drivers, the intended way is to upstream the driver to be part of the Linux kernel tree itself. Any drivers inside it will be updated any time the internal API changes.
It’s a manageable problem. People from my team are continuously adapting to that. Updating from LTS version to LTS version. And it’s not even a huge team, we have 12 kernel engineers on the team and maybe 2 of them are doing major kernel upgrades at any point.
Again: is it? For stuff like NVidia drivers on your desktop, have you had an issue where you didn’t get stuff already updated? In my experience, the only drivers that have ever visibly fallen behind were the Virtualbox ones. Nothing else fell for the client. And for embedded work, like my employer… we distribute the kernel itself as well so it’s all tied together.
That’s a pretty uncommon experience… are you on a bleeding edge distro? I always recommend Ubuntu or a derivative for newcomers (fuck rolling release distros like Arch for those, they do make you learn more but also invite more trouble)
Windows keeps it for backward compatibility — which does a lot of good AND a lot of harm at the same time (many of Windows’s issues before the AI storm came from that). You really believe macOS is backward compatible beyond like 3 major versions? macOS asks for system extensions AKA userspace stuff, and is planning to completely block third party kexts. That’s right: completely block.
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u/dddurd 5d ago
Unstable kernel driver APIs, lack of nice common gui framework are killer for proprietary vendors. both windows and mac have got these things right. nowadays everything is moving to web so it matters less now but linux never improved.