Generally speaking, Linux needs better binary compatibility.
Currently, if you compile something, it’s usually dynamically linked against dozens of libraries that are present on your system, but if you give the executable to someone else with a different distro, they may not have those libraries or their version may be too old or incompatible.
Statically linking programs is often impossible and generally discouraged, making software distribution a nightmare. Flatpak and similar systems made things easier, but it’s such a crap solution and basically involves having an entire separate OS installed in parallel, with its own problems like having a version of Mesa that’s too old for a new GPU and stuff like that. Applications must be able to be packaged with everything they need with them, there is no reason for dynamic linking to be so important in Linux these days.
I’m not in favor of proprietary software, but better binary compatibility is a necessity for Linux to succeed, and I’m saying this as someone who’s been using Linux for over a decade and who refuses to install any proprietary software. Sometimes I find myself using apps and games in Wine even when a native version is available just to avoid the hassle of having to find and probably compile libobsoletecrap-5.so
It actually happened to me today on Arch.
I updated the system, including the kernel, everything went smoothly with no errors or warnings, I rebooted, and it said the ZSTD image created by mkinitcpio was corrupt and it failed to boot.
I booted the arch install iso, chrooted into my installation and reinstalled the linux package, rebooted, and it worked again.
I have no explanation, this is on a perfectly working laptop with a high end SSD, no errors in memtest, not overclocked, and I’ve been using this Arch install for over a year.
The chances of the package being corrupt when I downloaded it and the hash still being correct are astronomically low, the chances of a cosmic ray hitting the RAM at just the right time are probably just as low, the fact that mkinitcpio doesn’t verify the images that it creates is shocking, the whole thing would have been avoided on an immutable distro with A/B partitions.