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> I wish I could install Firefox or Chrome from a decade ago as easily as I can install the latest versions. You can, on Windows. The secret is the system keep

by Crinus 7y ago

> I wish I could install Firefox or Chrome from a decade ago as easily as I can install the latest versions. You can, on Windows. The secret is the system keeping backwards compatibility in mind for its core APIs, something that most desktop APIs on Unix (outside of X11) do not do.

jolmg 7y ago
The main problem in Linux is dependency updates, and I never understood how dependencies in Windows work. Are most programs built as fat binaries that carry all their dependencies with them? Or do Windows programs just never build on top of other 3rd party programs and always just depend on what's provided by the base OS?
- Crinus 7y ago
  A bit of both. The base OS itself provides way more functionality out of the box than Linux (imagine an asterisk here) and that is done through APIs that have remained backwards compatible going back to Windows 95 (of course new stuff got added in later versions). When applications want more they bundle their dependencies with them (either via static or dynamic linking) and sadly that is indeed repeated. However the base OS provides enough functionality that you do not need to, e.g, bundle an entire GUI toolkit that implements everything from scratch (ignoring Qt/Java/etc programs here - they do that for portability but they didn't have to if they only cared about Windows). (now the asterisk: in terms of functionality above and taking an average desktop distribution in mind you'd probably find more of it in Linux, but applications can't rely on most of that functionality being available on all distros as a "standard" and even for the stuff they could expect, way more often than not they rely on specific version ranges - e.g. an application cannot rely on "Gtk", it can only rely on "Gtk <version>.xxx", as Gtk itself isn't backwards compatible across major versions).
- batat 7y ago
  Depends, also WinSxS[1] helps. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-by-side_assembly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-by-side_assembly

by Crinus 7y ago

jolmg 7y ago

The main problem in Linux is dependency updates, and I never understood how dependencies in Windows work. Are most programs built as fat binaries that carry all their dependencies with them? Or do Windows programs just never build on top of other 3rd party programs and always just depend on what's provided by the base OS?

Crinus 7y ago
A bit of both. The base OS itself provides way more functionality out of the box than Linux (imagine an asterisk here) and that is done through APIs that have remained backwards compatible going back to Windows 95 (of course new stuff got added in later versions). When applications want more they bundle their dependencies with them (either via static or dynamic linking) and sadly that is indeed repeated. However the base OS provides enough functionality that you do not need to, e.g, bundle an entire GUI toolkit that implements everything from scratch (ignoring Qt/Java/etc programs here - they do that for portability but they didn't have to if they only cared about Windows). (now the asterisk: in terms of functionality above and taking an average desktop distribution in mind you'd probably find more of it in Linux, but applications can't rely on most of that functionality being available on all distros as a "standard" and even for the stuff they could expect, way more often than not they rely on specific version ranges - e.g. an application cannot rely on "Gtk", it can only rely on "Gtk <version>.xxx", as Gtk itself isn't backwards compatible across major versions).
batat 7y ago
Depends, also WinSxS[1] helps. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-by-side_assembly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-by-side_assembly