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Comment by tomatotomato37 | Hacker News Reader

That mindset only really applies to the weird enthusiast OS's like arch & gentoo, where the need to recompile half your stuff after an upgrade is almost the point. Everything else from my experience has been pretty good at maintaining compatibility

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What about that classic meme of Linus (Tech Tips, not Torvalds) running the equivalent of `apt update` on Pop OS and breaking the entire Desktop Environment?

I'd be lying if I said I'd never done something similar when trying to switch from the open-source Nvidia drivers (glitchy at 4k60, at the time) to the officially provided ones.

To be clear, Linus got an error trying to install an app via the GUI, ran the equivalent terminal command, and directly overrode the warning telling him what would happen before his desktop environment broke. It wasn’t quite as simple as just apt upgrade.

The point is that it gave him a text warning that basically said "press y to destroy your whole Desktop Environment" buried in a wall of text that you'd normally ignore. This is beyond terrible UX and would never happen outside of Linux/FOSS.

In a proprietary operating system, you just wouldn't have been allowed to uninstall the desktop environment at all. Unfortunately, you are also forbidden from uninstalling Facebook if they have a deal with your device's manufacturer.

There is a huge space between cli everything and pre-infested walled garden. I have always felt that there should be more visual differences in the standard newby frendly tools for linix. Many problems would be avoided with a basic graphic interface.

In my experience that's backwards; Arch and Gentoo are far better at telling you exactly what you need to stay backwards compatible and letting you do it than the fancy commercial distros are. (E.g. compare the difficulty of running the original Linux release of Quake 3 on those distros).

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