I actually had more success getting old windows games to run in modern linux with wine than in modern windows.
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
The comment you replied to says the opposite. It's a half-truth, but Linux+WINE does some backwards compatibility better than Windows.
First, Wine doesn't have an arbitrary limitation against running 16-bit executables AFAIK
Second, there is anecdotal evidence of some older games breaking to graphics driver updates on Windows, but running fine (or even faster!) on Linux thanks to a much more straightforward graphical stack (and the fact that DXVK is dark magic). Even something as simple as fullscreen mode support on old games can be a buggy and flickery pain in the ass, whereas on Linux the same binary will work flawlessly with any decent compositor.
I like to think of it like a defense mechanism. By ensuring old abandoned software won't work, you don't have to worry about it having a major security vulnerability. Any old software that still works probably isn't abandoned.
I see your point, but unfortunately, there's lots of proprietary old software that has been abandoned by the original company (Either because they went out of business or just moved on) that's still in active use and the source never released.
There was just an article on Lemmy a few weeks ago on how multi-million dollar research facilities still have to use ancient software to run critical scientific machines. Although in that particular case they had to maintain old PCs as well because of proprietary drivers
“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).
MacOS: "The world came into existence fully formed ten years ago so it would be silly to even try running software older than that."
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.
macOS: Noo we broke compatibility with 64-bit and with Intel
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.
Me: can you run this cool game I found
Mac: no
Or simply just: Too old version not supporting latest macos version.
THEY BREAK SHIT WHEN THEY RELEASE A NEW MACOS HOLY FUCK.
Both of them:
Program: crashes
weirdoldlib.so.13: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Googles wierdoldlib.so.13
Comes across forum post:
"Hey guys, I'm trying to run this ancient-ass game, and Linux says I need this thing apparently?"
"Update: never mind, I fixed it."
A wave of rage crashed over me at that last line. WHYYYY do they always do that?
A lot of windows UI is 30 years old
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.
And there will be a riot if they try to change it
No, literally. 11 still has some pre-XP dialog boxes. The framework they were written in obviously too (+at least 11 more).
Applies to both, some parts of windows havent been updated since forever
Did everyone forget Chad is a caricature?
It's just another rage comic character
MFW:
That's just not true in windows case
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.
Anakin: "I'm going to install this 25 year old game"
Padme (smiling): "Install and run it, right?"
Anakin: smirk
Padme (frowning): "Install and run it, right?"
Can you open this 25 year old document? Windows: Why would I want to do that? Linux: Of course!
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.
Unix: the version of the OS that built it is still supported (solaris 10 may have a 22-year support window, and counting).
Windows: Can you run 25 year old binaries? Yes you can.
Linux: Can you build 25 year old software from source? Yes you can.
Arch: wtf? Remove that bloat immediately and check for updates
Installing 25 year old binaries on Linux is rather interesting - relevant for stuff like some of the old Loki ports. Problem is mostly that they've been written with kernel 2.2 in mind, which does have different behaviour for quite a few things - you generally can find old libc versions compatible with the binary, but those libc versions don't necessarily play nice with the kernel.
There are some compatibility flags which made things work last time I checked - but not sure if that's the case, and it definitely won't work forever, given that 32bit x86 support is likely to be dropped eventually.
I hired into a community college IT dept ~2000. Manager told me they were a Windows shop. Ha np. I proceeded to replace 3/4 of their server room with Linux. email, cd servers, file servers, web servers, db2, PeopleSoft(gack!). I was working on a cs degree which they paid for about half
Windows can't even install its own old products! I remember back when I had to upgrade systems from XP to 7 and the users needed IE8 in able to use some internal websites. Microsoft was like "Fuck you, you can only use IE9 or above" there was literally no way to download IE8.
I also hate it when they only make shit available through the Windows Store or another convoluted process. No more downloading a simple EXE or MSI and double clicking it!
Hint: :q!
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