...and what's more, he claims this happened over "many years". What is he talking about? The last API-breaking change in GTK+ came with the move from GTK+ 1.2 to GTK+ 2.0 back in 2002.
"[de Icaza] thinks the real reason Linux lost is that developers started defecting to OS X because the developers behind the toolkits used to build graphical Linux applications didn’t do a good enough job ensuring backward compatibility between different versions of their APIs. "For many years, we broke people’s code," he says. "OS X did a much better job of ensuring backward compatibility.""
What exactly are these broken APIs that he thinks are driving developers away from Linux desktop development?
Taking the GNOME case. The move to GTK+ 3.0 hardly broke any API's. From an application developer's point of view, most of the widget API's were identical with the sort of minor changes to be expected from any previous revision bump. Granted, some things were deprecated in the GNOME stack, such as the system tray. But this is not the same as breaking an API.
Slashdot Mirror
...and what's more, he claims this happened over "many years". What is he talking about? The last API-breaking change in GTK+ came with the move from GTK+ 1.2 to GTK+ 2.0 back in 2002.
"[de Icaza] thinks the real reason Linux lost is that developers started defecting to OS X because the developers behind the toolkits used to build graphical Linux applications didn’t do a good enough job ensuring backward compatibility between different versions of their APIs. "For many years, we broke people’s code," he says. "OS X did a much better job of ensuring backward compatibility.""
What exactly are these broken APIs that he thinks are driving developers away from Linux desktop development? Taking the GNOME case. The move to GTK+ 3.0 hardly broke any API's. From an application developer's point of view, most of the widget API's were identical with the sort of minor changes to be expected from any previous revision bump. Granted, some things were deprecated in the GNOME stack, such as the system tray. But this is not the same as breaking an API.