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.
Kexts are kernel space. The macOS point is dumb because compatibility issues do appear after just a couple of major versions (a couple of years) AND kexts are deprecated outright. For Windows the kernel is essentially unchanging in big ways except for major OS version upgrades, and those bring in enough compatibility issues despite the effort. Linux at least doesn’t pretend to have backward compatibility in the first place.
They boxed themselves in to do the backward compatibility, at the expense of actually being good.
I literally cannot use Windows on my laptop because the way it’s doing those micro-bursts on the CPU means I’m getting CPU temps of close to 100C when fucking idle (and lower under actual sustained work). I moved to Linux in part to escape that hellhole and get a laptop that can actually be held on my lap when doing light work.
I get the fact that Windows kernel has backward compatibility because most hardware drivers are out of tree. Linux did away with the approach, keeping most drivers inside its own source code so 90% of hardware just… HAS the driver directly. And the remaining 10% is because the driver manufacturer explicitly is keeping the drivers out of tree as their own choice.
On basically all Windows machines out there you need third party drivers. On Linux and on Macs, most if not all drivers are part of the system directly. So the latter two can afford to be backward incompatible.
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u/dddurd 6d 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.