Linux 6.9 Sees Invasive & Significant Changes To Workqueues

[anda_skoa]

It's why I keep saying Linux needs a killer app, that unique, must have, piece of software that is not available any place else.

Everytime something like that happens the software in question gets ported (natively or via some emulation), functionality partially or full appearing in similar apps elsewhere or even fully re-implemented

Take shells for example. They weren't new in general but Linux made a large number of people aware of how useful they are.
They got emulated in Windows, e.g. cygwin, came to Apple when they switched to macOS and now are even natively available on Windows, e.g. Powershell.

At some point Nero-burning-ROM was the app for burning CDROMs and DVDs but quickly other applications became available as alternatives.
When the company tried to expand onto other platforms they found that competitors had already capture so much market share that it was very difficult to even get a foothold, let alone taking over.

Apple released iTunes for other platforms because they deemed it more important to push the iPod and their store than to push macOS or hardware sales.

The reality is that if some Linux project, like Fedora or Ubuntu, decided to create that killer app that everyone wanted but made it exclusive to their distro, they would bury the competition on no time.

History has many pieces of distribution specific software or projects.
SUSE's Yast, for example. Totally unmatched at the time of its introduction but other distributions came up with their own tools fairly quickly.
Ubuntu tried several times but more of then not the others caught up or went even beyond.

Having a head start is nice but keeping ahead is costly, especially when an open competitor can draw more resources due to team work.

Imagine if the KDE project made a closed source game that was crazy good, everyone was talking about it and they said that if you wanted it you had to buy a Slimbook they sell

KDE doesn't sell Slimbooks, a company called Slimbook does.
They have some KDE branded models as incentive to buy for fans of KDE software.

KDE is essentially a software vendor. Like any other software vendor they want their target market to be as wide as possible.