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> The latest Office doesn't even install on Windows 7, nor 32-bit hardware. When people talk about Windows backwards compatibility they're mostly referring to

> The latest Office doesn't even install on Windows 7, nor 32-bit hardware. When people talk about Windows backwards compatibility they're mostly referring to running on apps on a new OS, not new apps running an old OS. I bet you could get very old versions Microsoft Office running on Windows 10. I've run Visual Studio 6.0 on a Win10 machine no problem. And yeah linux nowadays has a lot of drivers included with the kernel (I've bene shocked at some of the supported hardware) but vendor provided drivers of often super outdated. I have a decent chance trusting old driver binaries to run on windows. On Linux you likely have to be a driver developer yourself to just to get some vendor's driver source for an old 2.X kernel to compile, let alone run.

neltnerb 6y ago
It's kind of off topic so this'll be my last comment about it but I accept your point that backwards compatibility means running old software on a new OS. I was incorrect. It has been a very, very long time since I've run into hardware that I had any incentive to install vendor provided drivers for in order to get a computer running with Linux, with the exception of VMWare kernel modules and NVidia drivers, but Nvidia cards still run with noveau so the computer will still work so that you can get the proprietary drivers. And VMWare is proprietary software, so that's no surprise. I just have not done it for actual hardware other than Nvidia graphics cards in at least a decade. Maybe I've gotten lucky in the hardware I've bought or something, but I haven't had any drivers broken badly enough that I even would file a bug report except for my Nvidia proprietary driver that is buggy as heck. But I accept that my experience is also an anecdote.