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You're correct that this is not an advantage Linux has over Windows; both Windows and Linux strive to maintain strong backwards-compatibility guarantees. It's a

You're correct that this is not an advantage Linux has over Windows; both Windows and Linux strive to maintain strong backwards-compatibility guarantees. It's an advantage they both have over systems like macOS. And while Windows maintains near-perfect binary compatibility (I've run programs on Windows 10 that were last compiled a decade ago), Linux instead has excellent source compatibility. I've successfully compiled and used decade-old Linux utilities with no problems. This difference speaks to the different economic philosophies these platforms have. Microsoft expects you to buy software in a box at a store and use it forever. Linux expects you to use free software developed by volunteers. And Apple expects you to pay over and over again to avoid losing functionality.

cryptonector 8y ago
The Linux kernel is famous for trying really hard to maintain ABI backwards-compatibility. In practice this means that statically-linked executables from a decade ago will run just fine on Linux today, at least as far as interactions with the kernel is concerned (interactions with other parts of the system, it depends). The same is not necessarily true of dynamically-linked applications because user-space libraries' maintainers are not as exacting about backwards-compatibility. Note that this is not an argument for static linking, at least not in its current form.