> it would allow huge communities to emerge keeping very old software/games working indefinitely The Linux community already stumbles at this and needs Windows

> it would allow huge communities to emerge keeping very old software/games working indefinitely The Linux community already stumbles at this and needs Windows to help it out. "Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux" has been said so many times it isn't a joke any more. Keep in mind that the OS being open doesn't make the games open. Wine is possible because of Win32's die-hard commitment to long-term binary compatibility. I'm not so sure we're in a bad situation here. The Linux userspace has never had this degree of backwards binary compatibility. The kernel doesn't break userspace but userspace breaks itself all the time. Linux userspace gets lots of other benefits from this rapid-iteration approach that doesn't concern itself with literally decades of binary compatibility, but keeping old games running indefinitely isn't one of them.