Linus Torvalds Q&A
See at 6.42 minutes.
Quote:
"We make binaries for Windows and OSX. We basically don't make binaries for Linux. Why? Because making binaries for desktop Linux is a major **** pain in the ass. You don't make binaries for Linux. You make binaries for Fedora 19, Fedora 20, or maybe even RHEL 5 from 10 years ago."
"Debian has these rules that you should use shared libraries... but using shared libraries is not an option if they're experimental/unstable, used by two people, and one of the is crazy. Every other day, some ABI breaks."
"You just want to have to build one binary, and have it work. Preferably forever. Preferably across all Linux distributions. I actually think distributions have done a horrible job."
"We have one rule in the kernel: We don't break user space. ... If people break user space, I get very angry ... I explain to developers that this is a really important thing. And then, distributions come in, and they screw it all up. They break binary compatibility left and right...."
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And this, dear people, is the reason why almost no-one outside of the open source world writes software for desktop linux, or if they do, they eventually either give up, or state that you should use one specific distribution such as Ubuntu 14.04 or something, so they don't have to create 175 versions of their software. And, the developers will have to recompile and repackage all of their software each time the distribution they've chosen upgrades.
With most distributions, you can't upgrade applications and the operating system independently of one another.
These things are the reasons why Linux will never be an equal to Windows (and to some extent, but less so, the Mac) on the desktop, and is the main reason why I run Windows. To some extent, I even prefer Windows on the server, because I can run 3 or 4 Apache servers, all different versions, with different PHP versions and widely different configs installed. On Linux, things like that are very hard to do.
As I said, I have been thinking of switching to Linux for daily tasks, but in the end, at least up until now, for me it's just much more time-effective to smooth out or work around Microsoft's weirdness than to maintain a Linux desktop system.