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I'm not trying to defend Linux btw, and I appreciate Microsoft's approach to backward compatibility (some of the Windows games I play regularly hail from the la
by flohofwoe 2y ago
I'm not trying to defend Linux btw, and I appreciate Microsoft's approach to backward compatibility (some of the Windows games I play regularly hail from the late 90s).
Just wanted to point out that ABI stability alone probably isn't the reason why Windows is so backward compatible, there's most likely a lot of 'boring' QA and maintenance work going on under the hood to make it work.
Also FWIW some of the early D3D9 games I worked on no longer run on out of the box on Windows (mostly because of problems related to switching into fullscreen), I guess those games were not popular enough to justify a backward compatibility workaround in modern Windows versions ;)
- maccard 2y agoAgain, you’re technically correct but I don’t think it matters. Windows gives (in practice) DE, user space, and kernel stability, and various Linux distributions don’t. If you care about changing the Linux ecosystem to provide that stability it matters, but if you want to run an old application it doesn’t.