• cm0002@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

    • unalivejoy@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Turun@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        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”