What's up with all this "My 20 year old software still works!!!". Who actually runs unmaintained abandonware? I would rather prefer OS devs not wasting time maintaining legacy cruft and evolve with the times.
Convert Linux to Windows
71–80 of 459 posts
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#72What's up with all this "My 20 year old software still works!!!". Who actually runs unmaintained abandonware? I would rather prefer OS devs not wasting time maintaining legacy cruft and evolve with the times.
I play Silent Hunter III which was released in 2005. Also Half-Life sometimes. Everything older is going to be console games.
Businesses run the old stuff.
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#73I don't think a new distro is needed. Most commonly used windows apps can be made to work through wine, but the hacks used to make one app work can break others and vice versa. Similarly, everyone needs to play around with settings individually to get things to work. What works on one person's machine might not work on another's, because there's no consistency in, effectively, configuration. The simplest solution, to…
At this point nobody is going to learn a new system. People already know how to write and package exes which is the whole point. > but the hacks used to make one app work can break others and vice versa I think a lot of these problems could be avoided with a singular OS with the sole goal to support windows exes.
That exists, it’s called SteamOS.
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#74Ask IBM how well that idea worked.
I think it's fair to say that OS/2 had better Windows compatibility (for it's era) than Wine offers (in this era). The problem was that Microsoft introduced breaking changes with the introduction of Windows 95. While old Windows applications would continue to run under OS/2, IBM felt that it would take too much effort to introduce a compatability layer for Windows 95. If I recall correctly, it involved limitations with how OS/2 handled memory.
Besides, binary compatibity has never really been a big thing in Linux since the majority of software used is open source. It is expected to compile and link against newer libraries, but there is no real incentive for existing binaries to remain compatible. And if the software doesn't compile against newer versions of libraries, well, Windows has similar issues.
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#75What's up with all this "My 20 year old software still works!!!". Who actually runs unmaintained abandonware? I would rather prefer OS devs not wasting time maintaining legacy cruft and evolve with the times.
Lots of embedded stuff will have control software that's very old.
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#76What's up with all this "My 20 year old software still works!!!". Who actually runs unmaintained abandonware? I would rather prefer OS devs not wasting time maintaining legacy cruft and evolve with the times.
Is this sarcasm? Some of my favorite games are 20 years old. Windows is popular in a lot of manufacturing spaces because the equipment software doesn't get updated and only connects to old programs over 16 bit serial ports.
There's a whole world out there of legacy software that is happily churning along, and doesn't need to be updated.
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#77I still can't get MS Office 365 working on Linux over Wine, while no alternatives make me comfortable. Comparing Linux and Win32 ABI on Linux is nonsense without talking about Wine compatibility.
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#78What's up with all this "My 20 year old software still works!!!". Who actually runs unmaintained abandonware? I would rather prefer OS devs not wasting time maintaining legacy cruft and evolve with the times.
I still play Total Annihilation, from 1997.
Great game.
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#79People always talk about this “I can run a 20 year .exe file” situation but when I tell you that I have never, in 30+ years, EVER had a need to run a 20+ year executable, it just makes me go… yeah, and? Sure I believe backwards compatibility is a nice to have feature, but I have never, nor do I think I will ever, have a need to run 20-year-old software.
My experience is that a 20 year old exe file has a greater chance of running in wine than it would in windows, and a 20 year old Linux executable is going to fail because the shared libraries it depends on are unobtainable
In my experience:
20-year-old exe files can fail on both Windows and WINE if they touch something relatively obscure. It's easier to throw files at the problem under WINE though (you can just throw away the prefix if you break something). The single biggest mistake WINE makes is defaulting to a single shared prefix (and the second sin is similar - trying to integrate folders and menus naively).
20-year-old dynamic binaries on Linux can almost always work today; snapshot.debian.org has all the old libraries you'll ever need. The potential exception is if they touch something hardware-ish or that needs exclusive access, but this is still better than the situation on Windows.
20-year-old static binaries on Linux will fail surprisingly often, since there have been changes in filesystem and file layout.
Re: Convert Linux to Windows
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this point nobody is going to learn a new system. People already know how to write and package exes which is the whole point. > but the hacks used to make one app work can break others and vice versa I think a lot of these problems could be avoided with a singular OS with the sole goal to support windows exes.
That exists, it’s called SteamOS.
And if memory serves one of the important features of Proton is to control how each app is configured individually, precisely to let you do needed tweaks at a local level.