I'm not sure who you mean by "they", but there's a lot of difference between distros, and many different ways to put the pieces together (or leave them out) Co

I'm not sure who you mean by "they", but there's a lot of difference between distros, and many different ways to put the pieces together (or leave them out) Compiling from source is the most reliable way to run the latest and greatest version of a particular application that I've found to date, leaving out all the middlemen like package mantainers, whose competence I may or may not trust. And generally speaking, I'd trust a several-decades-old technique much more than something just released. As far as Windows software goes, I've found Wine to be a much more reliable platform for old Windows applications than Windows 7 or 10, although there's nothing better than emulated Windows 9x for running programs of that era. (I make "any browser" websites, so running 1995+ software is something I do on the regular.)