The purpose of the article was never to explain the exact operation in detail. It isn’t a blueprint; it’s an advocacy paper. Please don’t read more into my words than I intended. I’m not asking anyone to change anything. I’m inviting people to contribute ideas and help build this project voluntarily, according to their own interests and preferences. Clearly, this isn’t for you.

I read every word of your screed. You are advocating for an Easy Button. You don't have any details how it will work or why, you just want everyone else to change how they do things to your vague and unspecified plan for an Easy Button.

I'm clearly advocating for an open platform with compatibility in the article.

It isn’t a rare example. That “one example” (which isn’t even accurate) represents one example too many, first of all. Look at the contribution history yourself: you’ll find many cases where changes broke things because the affected code was 7–10 years old.

There’s a reason Windows maintains near-total backward compatibility: a ten-year-old line of code may still be performing essential work, and there’s no inherent need to remove it. Your standards for what qualifies as acceptable deprecation are subjective, but the broader world expects software to maintain compatibility for decades.

I’m working to build an open platform...

My bad, why didn't you link your repo from the start? Then we could have a productive discussion about your design docs and the initial code for your new OS.

I know.

This isn’t a forum for throwing quick witted gotchas. I’m trying to have a constructive discussion. at any case, it's because I’m working to build an open platform with proper backward compatibility, so please engage seriously rather than trolling.

Since it has what you want, why don't you use Windows in that case?

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying you’re jumping to conclusions too quickly.

I had a long discussion about this yesterday, so I didn’t want to repeat the same arguments all over again. At this point, it feels like I’m encountering the same arguments across different platforms.

Maybe I should add a Q&A section to the article to clarify my points. Many people have raised interesting perspectives, not because I haven’t considered them, but because I have a particular viewpoint that I didn’t fully explain in the article itself.

EDIT: at any case, to engage with your points: To you, these problems are solved, or nonexistent because you are comfortable using Linux in this specific way. but it is not ready as it is for the wider world outside of the people who are comfortable with the existing levels of compatibility it offers, which isn't much compared to Windows. Also, I am not just offering better compatibility, but a better packaging and distribution model as well. and an over all more polished experience, though the latter wasn't explicitly mentioned in the article, it is implicit.

Maybe this helps

https://linux.die.net/man/1/fdupes

I am not talking about the kernel. and the userspace of either platform is nowhere near as strong as it is on Windows.

As a lot of you already know, backward compatibility has never really been the strong suit of Linux or the BSDs.

From the first sentence I have the strong impression the author is deeply confused and mistaken.

Not in this economy. I've never had enough good offers to be able to risk it.

In any case, I am a software engineer and have never had the ability to negotiate my contract to that extent.

Have you ever tried? This kind of negotiation unfortunately typically requires a job change, employers are really really bad at understanding how valuable it is to motivate employees at little to no cost to them.

If you're just talking for voice to text, I've used this one for a while. Works better than the one built into my phone, and I don't have a ton of complaints.

https://github.com/cjpais/Handy

If they have options in other fields, they likely know it and are remaining in the education profession because of their love for it; that's certainly true for every educator I know currently. Many municipal school systems exploit this love ruthlessly to pay their teachers less.

In any case, I am a software engineer and have never had the ability to negotiate my contract to that extent. Teachers typically have significantly less leverage even than I do.

If you only care about saving drive space, you can also just use a file system that has deduplication built in, like btrfs, and just run a dedup pass.

This doesn't deduplicate file references, but does save space on disk.

https://kde.org/donate/

Then why did you post here if you're not willing to discuss it here? It seems you just want everyone to agree with you. Sorry to disappoint.

There are many problems with existing solutions, I've already had a long discussion on this on the subreddit. and I went in more detail in the conversation. check it out if you're interested.

Oh right, I guess it world help if I had basic knowledge of the steam frame. For some reason I thought it was like steam machine but handheld.

Its abstractions all the way down...

What is the opposite of code golf?

I did read it. It's not that long.

I still don't know what problem you are trying to resolve that doesn't already have one or more solutions.

You listed one issue, specific to gaming and cheating, that was simple human error and miscommunication that I don't believe would be solved by what you are proposing.

What other examples do you have? You seem to be starting with an assumption that everyone knows and agrees what the problem is without truly stating it.

The Linux kernel, and most userspace libraries already have a contract to maintain backwards compatibility. Some developers may choose to ignore this or make mistakes and break this contract. Again I do not believe that adding some new compatibility layer will fix this.

I'm sorry, but your article seems very hand wavy to me and doesn't have enough detail on how it would work. What you are proposing seems huge. I can't imagine enough people buying in to the idea to get it off the ground.

While I'm using KDE for ages, that plushy is not for me. I would not mind spend money on them, but not for that.