Arch: wtf? Remove that bloat immediately and check for updates
Mac: No
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
“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).
Windows: nope, too old. Find a version that’s compatible with your current installation.
Trust me, I tried playing some old CD games from my dad’s shed on Windows 10 for such a long time, it wouldn’t even let me do that without having to rely on a virtual machine. Most of those games were in French and German, btw.
I mean, I kind of understand with Heroes of Might and Magic 1 or Prehistorik 2 or something. But heck, even Guitar Hero 3 is impossible to install and play on Windows 10.
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.
Carbon wasn’t that prevalent 10 years ago. 15, maybe. 20, definitely.
10 years ago, Carbon was already officially deprecated, and it had clearly been a second-class citizen for years before that. Most apps were already using Cocoa at that point.
What do you mean? I have yet to find a way to install any game on Windows older than ~20 years.
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
Windows has a lot of legacy components, because there’s this Fortune 500 corporation which still depends on it in 2023. Say what you want about Windows, but its backwards compatibility is unmatched. Windows also had 32-bit x86 CPU support until Windows 10, meaning that it could still run some 16-bit Windows 3.0 apps.
It’s updated by the entreprise not users
Exactly. Profit is the only thing that matters, so things only change if they’ll increase profits.
Then why are they acting like they want to gain less profits ?
More ads/data harvesting gives you more profit
No, literally. 11 still has some pre-XP dialog boxes. The framework they were written in obviously too (+at least 11 more).
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.
macOS: Noo we broke compatibility with 64-bit and with Intel
Me: can you run this cool game I found
Mac: no
Applies to both, some parts of windows havent been updated since forever
Both of them:
Program: crashes
weirdoldlib.so.13: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Windows: Can you run 25 year old binaries? Yes you can.
Linux: Can you build 25 year old software from source? Yes you can.
Did that as a work project on Unix. My peer had a similar porting project.
I thought I was screwed: 20-year-old c-based backup tool. His was easy: this perl web app is installing on a new box because its old one is being lifecycled.
Actual: after 3 weeks of dependency hell he tossed it all and rewrote the thing in c from scratch overnight. My c project was make;make-install with no errors.
I think it’s been recompiled a few times since then, without any code changes.
That’s just not true in windows case
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.
it often was hit or miss with games though. I remember some games from 95/98 to run on 2000, then not on XP, somehow on Vista and 7, but not on 10. And other games ran on XP, but not Vista and 7…
its all weird with windows
It’s usually the apps themselves doing weird things - Using undocumented APIs, expecting the system to be set up in a particular way, relying on bugs in the OS, etc. Windows tries, and actually emulates old bugs for popular apps so they continue to work, but it can’t be bug-compatible forever.
Apps/games that work on XP should mostly work on newer versions as long as you set them to run with Windows XP compatibility (in the settings of the EXE), but there’s definitely edge cases.
Windows is still better than MacOS by far
Did everyone forget Chad is a caricature?
It’s just another rage comic character
