What I find so frustrating is that Windows, under the hood, is so solid. It's just the UI with Bing/Ads/telemetrics/etc integration is so crap, like they've ruined a solid OS with crappy surface level stuff.
It's as if, it's a product made by a giant corporation with over a dozen different teams of skilled people, with different managers and different visons on how their own team's work should impact the final product for their own career advancement purposes.
Sure. Apple is also giant and (probably?) fits those descriptors as well. Why is Mac so solid under similar circumstances?
A fun side-effect of the "general" stability of Windows APIs is that Win32/DX has become a very stable and reliable "universal" API for Linux (and other OSes) via the massive amount of work put into Wine/Proton. I keep seeing games drop their Linux-native releases in favor of just shipping for proton.
The Proton-aware releases often are easier to setup and run better than the Linux-native releases.
That's been my experience as well. EU4's Linux-native release has issues with scaling and cursors on ultrawide monitors. Proton version is flawless.
There's been quite a few cases for me, like Star Citizen for example, where games perform significantly better under Proton with DXVK than it does on Windows!
See also https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Win…
Nice. OpenBSD does something similar, with the difference being that there are no exemptions for specific software—they expect developers to fix their broken programs.
That’s not a DOS app, it’s a Win32 console app. DOS apps (16-bit or 32-bit) or Win16 apps would not run natively.
Win16 got dropped at some point, probably because keeping it didn't add up financially. I have little doubt they could have kept support for much older stuff.
There's a "pirate" port of NTVDM to 64-bit Windows (from leaked NT 4.0 source) so it's certainly not technically infeasible: https://github.com/leecher1337/ntvdmx64
See also https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Win…
Nice. OpenBSD does something similar, with the difference being that there are no exemptions for specific software—they expect developers to fix their broken programs.
Clearly missing the point. The OP mentions DOS, so this was the mid-90s. OpenBSD didn't exist (Theo hadn't burned all his bridges with NetBSD yet). There were NO updates. You bought software, games especially, in a shrink wrapped box at a brick and mortar store. Most people outside universities did not have internet access. If you were an extremely privileged few, you could download small patches from a BBS or online service but this was extremely rare. You got what you got. The development model was different. It had to work under any circumstances. There was no "we'll fix it in the next sprint!" and push it to the app store. Developers had no way to contact their customers.
Regarding that hobbyist OS OpenBSD, where the developers care about nothing besides security, there were no proprietary application packages available. Most retailed applications in those days ran on SunOS/Solaris or HP/UX.
All the people on that Twitter thread getting butthurt about it and complaining that Windows' backwards compatibility is a bad thing... WTF koolaid have they been drinking? I don't often sing Microsoft's praises but backwards compatibility is something they get absolutely right: something they've always got right. Everything doesn't have to be changing and breaking all the time and, to me, it's a mark of maturity whe…
The Linux world would benefit strongly from having a much bigger commitment to backwards compatibility in foundational libraries. Obviously there is nobody who can force e.g. OpenSSL to keep supporting old versions or to provide them as wrappers over the latest version, or to force GTK to keep around working versions of libraries exposing all interfaces dating from GTK 1.0 onwards. But if we could have a project to do just that, that would be great. We all want people to move with the times and adopt new versions of their dependencies so security exploits can be patched, but right now if you're writing software for Linux, either you package all your dependencies with it (forever calcifying all security exploits), or you keep on top of all updates of everything you use, or your software simply won't run within a couple of years. The open source community lives and dies by the ability of users to run existing software. Effectively continually deleting open source software from existence, while windows keeps supporting every single program written since 30 years ago, means we're always falling behind in usefulness. There ought to exist an organisation dedicated to maintaining old versions of widely used system libraries either in their original form, or as wrappers over the new versions (to the extent possible), so that people can rely on their existing software. Since we're talking about open source, that would mean maintaining the development kits as well, so old source can be built on new systems. It makes no sense to just let all this work rot, it is our greatest treasure.
I wish there was a backwards compatibility option to give applications a “virtual display” which runs in a window, for old programs which only know how to run fullscreen at 1024x768.
I once made a program (Intended for Games only, doesn't support standard windows controls) that allows you to stretch an otherwise fixed-size window. Uses D3D9 and Pixel Shaders to draw the upscaled window. https://github.com/Dwedit/GameStretcher
Oh, where was this when I really needed it a few years ago...
I was playing an old MMORPG called The Realm. It's been live since 1995 and ran until just a couple months ago. It only knew how to run in 640x480.
I tried to write a program that would create a scaled up version, but it didn't work well, especially since the game would create child windows for certain UI elements. I was writing it in C, which isn't my strongest language, simply so I could call Win32 APIs more easily.
It's as if, it's a product made by a giant corporation with over a dozen different teams of skilled people, with different managers and different visons on how their own team's work should impact the final product for their own career advancement purposes.
Sure. Apple is also giant and (probably?) fits those descriptors as well. Why is Mac so solid under similar circumstances?
Apple employs “Release Managers”, where a single person is ultimately responsible for deciding which features ship in new projects.
Apple also, due to the hardware business, adheres to a release schedule where features must all be consolidated onto single branches (“convergence”), rather than letting individual teams ship incrementally.
It's as if, it's a product made by a giant corporation with over a dozen different teams of skilled people, with different managers and different visons on how their own team's work should impact the final product for their own career advancement purposes.
Sure. Apple is also giant and (probably?) fits those descriptors as well. Why is Mac so solid under similar circumstances?
Apple is not even on the same "giant" shelf as Windows, so the circumstances are not similar either.
What I find so frustrating is that Windows, under the hood, is so solid. It's just the UI with Bing/Ads/telemetrics/etc integration is so crap, like they've ruined a solid OS with crappy surface level stuff.
You forgot the mandatory MSFT accounts to sign in with no way around last I checked (a few months ago).