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> [...] Linus has not bothered to write them down himself [...]

He's a kernel hacker and a technical leader. He doesn't write specs for the userspace, that's the least of his concerns. Linux has very strong guarantees on syscall backwards compat - Go doesn't even use libc. This is all by design.

Even the name "GNU/Linux" was something FSF tried to impose on distributions. The distributions being distributions, were free to brand themselves as they willed, which is 100% fair under the license terms.

This ecosystem has always been a bazaar, if that's not for you - use a BSD. (e.g. macOS.)





This is not a judgment. It is simply a fact. Linux uses cross-distribution standards, because of this fact; these standards should not be misidentified as cross-platform standards - which I believe TFA was doing - as that's not the purpose they exist for.

> has not bothered

> This is not a judgement

"did not" is not judgemental but "did not bother" strongly implies judgement.

I do think it's true, however, that had Linus expressed an opinion on this it would have been hard to ignore.

Edit to add: Bear in mind that XDG is a relatively new thing compared to Linux (more so compared to Unix).


As a “BSD” even MacOS seems to be the odd one unlike the others.

Who writes .gitconfig?



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