Oh yeah, the secret so deep, the secret so hidden, the secret so unbelievable… that everyone knows about it.

Posted Feb 10, 2012 13:21 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

You forgot about eglibc, dietlibc, etc. And for xlib there is xcb and xcb-xlib as well.

Which does not change anything. EGLIBC strives to be source and binary compatible with GLIBC and dietlibc is rarely used as glibc replacement. Microsoft, too, offered numerous version of MSVCRT: Windows 7 includes three or four "out of the box".

The important thing is not to decide when to add something but when to remove something. And the typical answer: years after the replacement is available. FCB was introduced in MS DOS 1.0 (in 1981) and deprecated in MS DOS 2.0 (in 1983). It was supported till "grand unification" of Windows (in 2001). And still some people complained because Windows XP broke their beloved WordStar.

Now, some interfaces are abandoned much faster (think DirectMusic) and then Microsoft is [rightfully] hated - but these are rare exceptions, not rules. In Linux world... yes, we have kernel, yes, we have glibc and xlib... and that's about it. Well, GTK+ comes close. Everything above is subject to sudden breakage. And while compatibility is possible (as someone pointed out you just need to pull bunch of old libraries from older versions of the distribution) it's not automatic: user must manually find and install these libraries, etc.

At some point it just becomes too tiresome and people switch to Windows or MacOS. Where things work "out of the box" and you desktop looks like a desktop not as Tamagotchi.