On Mon, 27 Sept 2021 at 23:31, Zane Healy via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Sep 27, 2021, at 2:15 PM, Nemo Nusquam via cctalk <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > > On 2021-09-27 10:07, Joshua Rice via cctalk wrote (in part): > >> > >> However, much of the "Linux" software is in fact POSIX software, and can > >> quite easily be ported between Linux and other *NIX-likes, such as > >> Solaris, macOS and the *BSD family. > > > > I cannot agree. Many developers ensure that their software runs under > > their particular distribution and then call it POSIX. Porting to UNIX > > systems, such as Solaris or macOS, can be difficult and tedious. (Of > > course, this is not a Linux issue.) > > > > N. > > This also sums up nicely what is Linux’s greatest failing. Software vendors > need “Linux”, and what they get is “Red Hat”, “SLES”, “Ubuntu”, etc. and as a > result, the users suffer. This is why most commercial apps target MacOS and > Windows, or more often than not, just Windows.
Everything I personally develop for Linux will build on all Linux distros, and also IRIX, Solaris, AIX, and, until recently, Tru64 (because I have access to those systems, except for Tru64 now). And to some extent BSD variants. It's not hard at all. And the company I work for used to have build systems for all of the above until not that far ago, but, as customers more and more move to Linux systems the build support and tests have been removed for most of the rest (AIX still hangs on by a thread). As for the various Linux distros, the issue isn't really that they are that different, it's that they don't have the same version of core software - in particular moving targets like the C++ compiler (and this goes for various releases of the same distro too). I started testing Linux just for fun in early 1992 (because unlike 386BSD, Linux supported disk partitions, and that meant I could test it on a 486 where the primary OS was OS/2). When my X terminal then broke down in April 1991 I replaced it with a 486 system running Linux, kernel 0.95c. And I was an early tester for the ext file system and X11. Even that early that Linux box was good enough to replace an X terminal, even though most of the development I did was by accessing a remote Sun box. And I never looked back - it's *always* been "ready for the desktop" for me.
