I have little Linux experience, so pardon me for asking silly questions. Doesn't Linux then choose a weird place to put the border between "OS" and "userspace"? If, say, an opengl library or an ssl library installed by the distribution breaks backward compat with earlier versions, how is that not the OS breaking backward compat? Sure, if a user hand-installs some new library version, globally in the system, --force, y y y, then I get it. Things will break. But that's not what's going on, right?
It feels a bit weird to see the kernel folks put so much effort into "never breaking userland" only to have the distributions throw that all away with a "yolo, the new libyadayada is 1% faster and who cares about old programs!" kind of attitude. Is that really how this works? Or am I just misunderstanding some nuance? I'm not trying to be critical on anyone btw, I'm just trying to understand what's going on :-)
It feels a bit weird to see the kernel folks put so much effort into "never breaking userland" only to have the distributions throw that all away with a "yolo, the new libyadayada is 1% faster and who cares about old programs!" kind of attitude. Is that really how this works? Or am I just misunderstanding some nuance? I'm not trying to be critical on anyone btw, I'm just trying to understand what's going on :-)