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.
I actually had more success getting old windows games to run in modern linux with wine than in modern windows.
“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).
The saying “the most stable ABI on Linux is win32” says that’s also true for Linux software unfortunately
Yeah, we need an equivalent of Wine for old versions of Linux.
Isn’t that just chroot?
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
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.
No offense, but that sounds a lot like apple and Microsoft arguing against freedom of the user.
“Installing an app from outside the app store could introduce a security vulnerability”
“We must have edge installed at all times to provide a good user experience. Replacing such a central part of the operating system could weaken the security of the device”
Both of them:
Program: crashes
Windows: Sucks, doesn’t it? Go cry in the corner then.
Linux: Run in the terminal for a nice log. Also check journalctl - maybe there’s something. Anyway, just run me through strace for the solution.
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
Gonna be honest the only older game I had trouble on windows with was Dragon Age Origins. No matter what I did, it crashed out every time
Dragon age is…. Old?
Origins was released in ‘09. So was windows 7.
It is closer to the release of the first Doom than it is to today.
Uhm. Doom was originally released in 1993. 30 years ago. Dragon age Origins was released in 2009. 14 years ago.
So…
Not quite. got a couple years before that’s true.FWIW, the first game I beat was the OG legend of zelda. I was 7, it was my dad’s game and i wasn’t supposed to be playing it for some reason. I got caught when my dad was strugling on the puzzles in the water temple and I gave some helpful advice… (“We won’t tell mom about this. now where did you say I go?”)
the first PC game I got heavily into was Age of Empires, though, a lot of my friends played starcraft, and insisted it was better than AoE; so I played one game with them. (They were all so very patronizing… so I let them be patronizing and then turned my ally to hostile and carpet-nuked the entire map.) (yeah. I went back to AoE after that, lol.)
my bad. I had 1996 in my memory, but that was the first Quake.
Have you heard the good word about eMacs?
Emacs is a nice operating system. It just needs a decent editor
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
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 ?
