linuxmemes

The saying "the most stable ABI on Linux is win32" says that's also true for Linux software unfortunately

Yea, there's a lot of (well deserved) shitting on Windows, but it's backwards compatibility is second to none. Not even Linux can give you a >70% chance that a piece of software or game you need/want from 1995 will still run (provided it's not 16bit only or needs a proprietary driver lmao) on a modern version of the OS

Months ago I wanted to run a lot of my old childhood games (mostly between 94 and 2001 release dates) for my own kids and I found most of them still installed and ran right out of the box on fully updated Win10, a lot of the rest required some fiddling with compatibility settings and the rest just didn't work because they were 16 bit only (You can still get them working natively if you install 32 bit Win10, but subjecting children to <4gb RAM is abuse) or some other weird issue so I fell back to ScummVM/DosBox for those

“Just run it in compatibility mode bro, it’s fine bro!!!”

My computer screen suddenly turns 640x480, flickers 5 times, then crashes because -checks notes- my graphics drivers are too new.

Yes this has actually happened to me. No I can’t remember with what game (I wanna say Deadly Premonition).

10 years ago is giving Apple too much credit. They were using Intel processors then, ARM now. For now, you can still run Intel applications, but that won’t last much longer.

More importantly, a 10 year old application is likely to use Carbon instead of Cocoa. Unless it’s an extremely simple application (i.e. hello world), it is unlikely to run.

Then there’s the depreciation of resource forks, a new filesystem, tons and tons of extra security restrictions, etc.

weirdoldlib.so.13: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

More like:

Can you install this 25 year old program?

Mac OS: LOL! Buy a new laptop!

My company is currently working through this.

The entire dev team has Macs. Most have Intels. Many are on M1. Some are on M2.

Security/IT teams feel the pain, dealing with all sorts of weird things. And their solution lately is saying "fuck it" and giving the dev a M2. Which is a bandaid as what if M3 and onwards continues to break something?

Fortunately, my team builds software and runs everything through docker.

Mac: can you install this 10 year old program: no.

Or simply just: Too old version not supporting latest macos version.

THEY BREAK SHIT WHEN THEY RELEASE A NEW MACOS HOLY FUCK.

Me: can you run this cool game I found

Mac: no

Pretty sure Windows has more legacy components than Linux just because no nerds are updating it in their free time

Always jarring when you open a folder dialog, and an unresizeable chunk of Windows 3.1 suddenly appears.

I know it's still in the ODBC settings, probably other places too.

No, literally. 11 still has some pre-XP dialog boxes. The framework they were written in obviously too (+at least 11 more).

And there will be a riot if they try to change it

It's just another rage comic character

Just because it installed, doesn’t mean it doesn’t run.

Or doesn’t come with 50x “are you sure” prompts

Plenty of old apps still run fine. I've got VB6 apps I wrote in the mid 2000s that still run. A previous employer has DLLs from 1999 still running in production on Windows Server - VB6 COM components with hundreds of thousands of lines of code in total. I'm reasonably sure than Office 2000 still works, too.

You do sometimes have to change the compatibility settings and run the apps as administrator (since they were designed for Windows 9x which didn't have separate admin permissions) but often they work.

Even some 16-bit apps work fine as long as you use a 32-bit version of Windows (Windows 10 or older; 11 dropped the 32-bit build). The 64-bit versions of Windows don't have the NTVDM component that's required to run 16-bit Windows and DOS apps. It's an optional component on 32-bit Windows and you need to manually install it.

A lot of effort is put in to backwards compatibility in Windows - Raymond Chen has blogs and books about it.

Drivers are definitely out. Some games are really iffy. Especially from the Win 9x era, where they'd do stupid things like look for a 9 in the version string of Windows, or get the amount of RAM as a 32 bit signed int, so refuses to install if you have 4GB RAM or more.

We had a lot of dodgy old DOS programs that were fine under Win98, but XP broke them.

More like:

Windows Of Course! You can even save it in the new format because the one you were using is pretty dated and insecure.