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It's not trivial to install a 20-year-old program on a modern distro

Meanwhile I have some mid-90s Win32 apps that still work fine on Windows 10, and a bunch of miscellaneous DOS utilities from the 80s that are just as functional. Of course, the same applies to those versions of WordPerfect. As much as people like to talk about "DLL hell" on Windows, the dependency problem seems far worse on Linux. I know of some very expensive software (IC design/EDA) that's very difficult to get running on anything but a specific minor version of a specific distro.

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It gets really bad once you need to support a libc5/a.out executable.

Linux never cared that much. If you're living in an open source world, binary compatibility isn't seen as important. At least that was my impression in the early days, but even now the corporations don't seem to care as much because desktop applications and other binary blobs don't target Linux as much. And for the server-side stuff, you've got containers or VMs.

I would bet that some gamers would cry out if a future revision would derive them of their Steam bloabs.

On the technical side, I do wonder how Windows pulls it all of. Sure, there's more API stability and often fewer external libraries, but there are also the compatibility modes you can set and probably some hidden stuff that you don't have to switch on manually. Wouldn't even be surprised if Windows itself would do a similar thing like GPU drivers and fix some compatibility problems for well-known applications ("I see this is Winword 2.0, so let's work around an allocator bug").

> Wouldn't even be surprised if Windows itself would do a similar thing like GPU drivers and fix some compatibility problems for well-known applications

Raymond Chen (Microsoft) wrote a book about it all, and runs a blog which mentions instances too - sorry, I don't have the links to hand, but he is easily found.

For important stuff like SimCity and Doom for example the Windows developers tested those apps to find any issues, debugged them, and actually made Windows change its behaviour depending upon the app that was running.

It didn't even matter that a bug was down to a game using undocumented features as the team knew Windows would still get the blame from the public/press for it not running, so it became necessary to make sure they worked even if Windows itself had to have per-program hacks added.

This is not an useful comparison. I also have some 25 year old utilities that will still run on my current desktop Linux (and the source will build on practically any operating system).

What does this say about trying to run a 25 year old office suite? Have you tried running word 4.0 on windows 10 lately? Will it print?

If you're running 32-bit Windows 10, then yes, Word 4 should work just fine. 32-bit Windows still includes the DOS box and it's highly compatible.

Me, personally, I run IBM PC DOS 7.1 (also a free download from IBM) under VirtualBox, and I run my handful of DOS apps in that.

I wonder if flatpak will (hopefully) become the standard for linux apps in one or two years time, and if in 20 years we'll just be able to go back and install the flatpaks and have solved that problem.

Valve seems to be betting on it, as Steam on Linux seems to use runtimes that are very similar to flatpaks.

I am 100% sure that this will not be the case. In my experience static linked binaries from a couple decades ago are _harder_ to run, not easier. Or at least much harder to fix once any of the pieces is broken.

Oh right, I forgot that the libraries themselves still need to run on the host system. Can that ever be a problem for binaries? Will flatpaks start bundling python 2.x at some point?

> the dependency problem seems far worse on Linux.

Mostly fixed by containers, which the solution proposed here, and other new technologies like flatpaks, snaps and appimages. It is sad we have no unique ultimate solution for the problem, but yes it is mostly solved nowadays.

Exactly, yes. I do not know how easy it would be to create a container with an old 32-bit version of Ubuntu, Debian or even Fedora, one old enough to run WordPerfect 8 well. But if someone could do it, the app could be packaged as a Snap or a Flatpak and in theory it would work on any modern x86 distro. I'd like that very much.

the ultimate solution is to release the source code and compile it against the newer ABI.

Do people still gripe about DLLs? I remember them being confusing and problematic 25 years ago when downloads and disk space were expensive, so apps tended to not ship with the DLLs they depend on. I haven't worried about DLL dependency or compatibility in at least a decade, maybe more, expect when trying to get a Windows app to run under Wine.

Some old Windows software still works well on Win10, while a lot of old Windows software does not. Some old Linux software is pretty easy to get running on a modern system, while some of it is not.

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