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You just can't claim that Windows has "backwards compatibility" if you have to "Google" for it. In a recent article about Linux backwards compatibility, I point

You just can't claim that Windows has "backwards compatibility" if you have to "Google" for it. In a recent article about Linux backwards compatibility, I pointed out that OSS support was terrible, which meant that many games would no longer run out of the box even if statically linked (actually, static linking made the problem harder). It doesn't matter that lack of OSS is a trivially fixable problem (much easier that having to fish for libraries), it still means Linux is _not_ backwards compatible. > I had to copy some missing deprecated Direct Draw DLLs that don't ship with modern Windows anymore and everything worked. You literally had to copy the ddraw DLL from the Wine project, thereby solidly proving the OP's point: Wine has these days better compatibility than Windows. > You can't expect modern Windows to ship 20+ year old DLLs One can excuse it however one sees fit but this shows that Windows has lost the backwards compatibility edge that it may once had.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>You just can't claim that Windows has "backwards compatibility" if you have to "Google" for it. [...] One can excuse it however one sees fit but this shows that Windows has lost the backwards compatibility edge that it may once had. I completely disagree with your line of thinking. If modern Windows would have shipped with all possible legacy DLLs, ancient visual C++ libraries and DirectX versions needed for running every possible 20+ year old piece of software, then everyone would claim windows is unnecessary bloated. Would you even want such bloat by default on all installations just for the handful of users who need to run 20+ year old software? The current situation is a good compromise between compatibility and bloat. Windows 11 can run 20+ year old software natively without virtualization but it's up to you to separately download the deprecated legacy DLLs that your 20+ year software requires. Also, looking at it relative to competition from Apple, it's incomparably better at backwards compatibility than MacOS. And Xbox is also better at emulating the 360 era games on the modern systems than Sony is at emulating the PS3.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  > The current situation is a good compromise between compatibility and bloat. By this logic, any operating system has perfect backwards compatibility, since you just have to fix whatever's broken ... even when the compatibility shims come from 3rd parties! Linux has perfect backwards compatibility, you just have to download this patched Gtk+ binary from this guy, etc. Whatever the excuse is, they have dropped their backwards compatibility story. It was part of their official, published ABI, and now it isn't. All the excuses are as bogus as they are on any operating system. Apple also claims they drop backwards compatibility to avoid "bloat", but it is just that, an excuse. And "bloat" is quite a bogus excuse, too, since it could for example offer to auto-download the required components like it does for previous .NET framework releases. Or even put an updated version on their download site (e.g. as with winhelp). Or just made it a Windows-independent redistributable (e.g. CRTs). One could have an argument if this was the case. (Apple did auto-downloads at some point). Yet here they just didn't care and 3rd parties like Wine had to come in fill the holes. Not to mention this is not what people have in mind when they think "bloat"; after all, Wine manages to provide all these APIs and sizes at significantly less than a barebones Windows installation.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >By this logic, any operating system has perfect backwards compatibility, since you just have to fix whatever's broken The issue with your logic is you only see things as black or white while, while backwards compatibility is various shades of gray, depending on factors that are mostly beyond Microsoft's control. Modern Windows cannot account for all possible APIs, DLLs and hacks/workarounds that were used by every developer 20+ years ago, including non standard libraries and APIs, so of course you might need to download some missing DDLs regardless. Even if you use Wine, you could still have to do that to run Red Alert 2 or other such apps. That doesn't mean backwards compatibility does not exist, it means it's not a guaranteed 100% success rate out of the box, depending mostly on what libraries, APIs and hacks the original app developer employed. And the excuses are not bullshit, but are a matter of money and return on investment and ratio of bloat plus freedom the app developers took at the time which isn't available on Modern windows for security reasons (Windows till and including XP was unsecure as f*ck, I don't think you want to have all those functions the developers of the time exploited, for better or worse, exposed in your modern installation of Windows just for 100% backwards compatibility). Microsoft can't be expected to ship every single outdated and insecure 20+ year old DLL and undocumented API with every copy of Windows, which is a non issue as the last fifteen F-500 cooperate sys-admins in the world who still need to run 20+ year old corporate apps on modern windows will definitely have the knowhow to copy some DLLs they trust to C:/System32 so their crusty corporates app will work. It's not too hard, to copy some files, is it? The 32 bit C++ executables I wrote in highschool for windows 95, still run right now on Windows 11 out of the box without any patches or issues. So backswords compatibility exists on windows live and well against your opinion that it doesn't. End of story.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

>You just can't claim that Windows has "backwards compatibility" if you have to "Google" for it. [...] One can excuse it however one sees fit but this shows that Windows has lost the backwards compatibility edge that it may once had. I completely disagree with your line of thinking. If modern Windows would have shipped with all possible legacy DLLs, ancient visual C++ libraries and DirectX versions needed for running every possible 20+ year old piece of software, then everyone would claim windows is unnecessary bloated. Would you even want such bloat by default on all installations just for the handful of users who need to run 20+ year old software? The current situation is a good compromise between compatibility and bloat. Windows 11 can run 20+ year old software natively without virtualization but it's up to you to separately download the deprecated legacy DLLs that your 20+ year software requires. Also, looking at it relative to competition from Apple, it's incomparably better at backwards compatibility than MacOS. And Xbox is also better at emulating the 360 era games on the modern systems than Sony is at emulating the PS3.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
> The current situation is a good compromise between compatibility and bloat. By this logic, any operating system has perfect backwards compatibility, since you just have to fix whatever's broken ... even when the compatibility shims come from 3rd parties! Linux has perfect backwards compatibility, you just have to download this patched Gtk+ binary from this guy, etc. Whatever the excuse is, they have dropped their backwards compatibility story. It was part of their official, published ABI, and now it isn't. All the excuses are as bogus as they are on any operating system. Apple also claims they drop backwards compatibility to avoid "bloat", but it is just that, an excuse. And "bloat" is quite a bogus excuse, too, since it could for example offer to auto-download the required components like it does for previous .NET framework releases. Or even put an updated version on their download site (e.g. as with winhelp). Or just made it a Windows-independent redistributable (e.g. CRTs). One could have an argument if this was the case. (Apple did auto-downloads at some point). Yet here they just didn't care and 3rd parties like Wine had to come in fill the holes. Not to mention this is not what people have in mind when they think "bloat"; after all, Wine manages to provide all these APIs and sizes at significantly less than a barebones Windows installation.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >By this logic, any operating system has perfect backwards compatibility, since you just have to fix whatever's broken The issue with your logic is you only see things as black or white while, while backwards compatibility is various shades of gray, depending on factors that are mostly beyond Microsoft's control. Modern Windows cannot account for all possible APIs, DLLs and hacks/workarounds that were used by every developer 20+ years ago, including non standard libraries and APIs, so of course you might need to download some missing DDLs regardless. Even if you use Wine, you could still have to do that to run Red Alert 2 or other such apps. That doesn't mean backwards compatibility does not exist, it means it's not a guaranteed 100% success rate out of the box, depending mostly on what libraries, APIs and hacks the original app developer employed. And the excuses are not bullshit, but are a matter of money and return on investment and ratio of bloat plus freedom the app developers took at the time which isn't available on Modern windows for security reasons (Windows till and including XP was unsecure as f*ck, I don't think you want to have all those functions the developers of the time exploited, for better or worse, exposed in your modern installation of Windows just for 100% backwards compatibility). Microsoft can't be expected to ship every single outdated and insecure 20+ year old DLL and undocumented API with every copy of Windows, which is a non issue as the last fifteen F-500 cooperate sys-admins in the world who still need to run 20+ year old corporate apps on modern windows will definitely have the knowhow to copy some DLLs they trust to C:/System32 so their crusty corporates app will work. It's not too hard, to copy some files, is it? The 32 bit C++ executables I wrote in highschool for windows 95, still run right now on Windows 11 out of the box without any patches or issues. So backswords compatibility exists on windows live and well against your opinion that it doesn't. End of story.