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My daily driver now is a Windows 11 Alder Lake desktop that I assembled last year, but I still keep my prior machines in working order because neither virtualiz

My daily driver now is a Windows 11 Alder Lake desktop that I assembled last year, but I still keep my prior machines in working order because neither virtualization nor emulation can hold a candle to execution on real, physical hardware. Specifically said prior machines are: * A Windows 7 Sandy Bridge desktop. * A Windows XP Pentium 4 Northwood desktop. * A Windows 98SE Pentium 2 laptop, with a Yamaha XG MIDI sound card. Microsoft and Windows are downright legendary with their commitment to backwards compatibility, but that becomes even better with access to many versions of Windows and the hardware of their times. Linux would not satisfy my needs and desires in any of my machines, let alone my daily driver. I don't have the time nor desire to faff around with dependency hell and terminal voodoo and maybe get something that half-works (which will immediately bork to a stiff breeze) when Windows instead will Just Always Work(tm) and get me going.

em-bee 3y ago
you are right of course. if it works, it works, and most times it does. i am specifically talking about those that still use XP because it doesn't work. those cases are few, mostly badly written games i guess. i am curious what kind of programs you still run on those old machines. linux may not satisfy your needs, but not everyone can afford to keep old machines around like you do. and those stories of dependency hell and terminal voodoo are corner cases on linux just as much as they are on windows. especially if someone is going to set up a linux machine specifically to run old windows programs in wine then they most certainly will not run into any such issues. most cases of dependency hell on linux are likely caused by inexperienced users who follow bad advice to install software from the wrong version or a different distribution. don't do that if you don't know how to do it without causing problems.
nyarlathotep_ 3y ago
Can't blame you for this. I'd scoff at this a few years back, but alas... I prefer linux in theory for my personal machines but I can hardly get a week without some issue (on ostensibly stable Ubuntu) either causing it to randomly fail when waking from sleep, gnome-desktop having catastrophic bugs like leaking memory to the point where none is left, or pegging the CPU, or stuttering, or.... and even without extensive packages installed I have things breaking there constantly, where I have to fight with apt and etc. MS backwards compatibility too is really an incredible feat.
- em-bee 3y ago
  that is a weird and unusual experience. i use linux for decades and i rarely, if ever experienced such issues.

em-bee 3y ago

you are right of course. if it works, it works, and most times it does. i am specifically talking about those that still use XP because it doesn't work. those cases are few, mostly badly written games i guess. i am curious what kind of programs you still run on those old machines. linux may not satisfy your needs, but not everyone can afford to keep old machines around like you do. and those stories of dependency hell and terminal voodoo are corner cases on linux just as much as they are on windows. especially if someone is going to set up a linux machine specifically to run old windows programs in wine then they most certainly will not run into any such issues. most cases of dependency hell on linux are likely caused by inexperienced users who follow bad advice to install software from the wrong version or a different distribution. don't do that if you don't know how to do it without causing problems.

nyarlathotep_ 3y ago

Can't blame you for this. I'd scoff at this a few years back, but alas... I prefer linux in theory for my personal machines but I can hardly get a week without some issue (on ostensibly stable Ubuntu) either causing it to randomly fail when waking from sleep, gnome-desktop having catastrophic bugs like leaking memory to the point where none is left, or pegging the CPU, or stuttering, or.... and even without extensive packages installed I have things breaking there constantly, where I have to fight with apt and etc. MS backwards compatibility too is really an incredible feat.

em-bee 3y ago
that is a weird and unusual experience. i use linux for decades and i rarely, if ever experienced such issues.