the actual operating environment presented by the kernel and the image loader for user-space software on linux is very, very stable. The guarantees that Window

the actual operating environment presented by the kernel and the image loader for user-space software on linux is very, very stable. The guarantees that Windows makes about backwards-compatibility go far beyond just the image-loader and syscalls. For comparison, the glibc backwards-compatibility story is... messier. https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/libs/glibc/hjl/compat/ https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/libs/glibc/hjl/compat/