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Comment by imiric | Hacker News Reader

> It can be a miracle, and yet still not be good enough.

"Good enough" is highly subjective. You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but millions of people also think otherwise.

> Even as a business user, knowing that if I build an app and it probably won’t work in 5 years, is all I need to know about this hobbyist toy.

That ultimately depends on your tech stack and app features, much more than your OS. If you build a statically linked ELF binary that runs on the command line, chances are it will continue to work decades from now. If, OTOH, your app depends on a specific version of a GUI toolkit or some esoteric libraries, you might run into issues in the future. This is the same on any other OS. Microsoft does a commendable job at maintaining backwards compatibility for apps written in their supported stacks, but step outside of this and you'll experience problems. Same for macOS to a lesser extent (Carbon -> Cocoa, etc.).

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> “Good enough" is highly subjective. You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but millions of people also think otherwise.

Ironically, I might as well point out that billions of people think otherwise of Linux. In some countries, a few trees is “good enough” as a bridge. The IRS, of course, says COBOL is “good enough” to use as a web backend for the moment.

The weirdest thing is how people complain that engineering is a race of the bottom. Scarcely a thread goes by here without a tragedy of the commons reference. Yet inexplicably, business executives are terrified cowards when it involves free software. This of course makes no sense; you can’t have both. Either the complaints are wrong, or Linux is in fact unsuitable for purpose.

> Microsoft does a commendable job at maintaining backwards compatibility for apps written in their supported stacks, but step outside of this and you'll experience problems

Oregon Trail, a game made for Windows 95, still runs on Windows 11. (Edit for below complaint, as I’m posting too fast: You need all the DLLs that came with it on the original CD in the same folder as the EXE.)

Try installing and running any Linux app, be it even GNOME Chess, from four years ago. See how it goes. Consider my allegory of the sand skyscraper.

On that note, the Carbon to Cocoa transition mostly wrapped up a decade ago, and was completed by the majority of apps two decades ago. Try installing a Linux program from 2005 with a UI made in any toolkit of your choice.

The Linux community chases trends and kills APIs more often than Google.

> Oregon Trail, a game made for Windows 95, still runs on Windows 11

Fatal error: MSVCRT70.DLL could not be found.

But that's easy enough to fix, right? Just dig through Windows's package manager (sorry, I meant MSDN) trying to guess the right vcredist, and try a few and hope for the best.

The Visual C++ .NET 2002 runtime shipped with Windows 95?

To be fair, I've seen plenty of commercial Windows software ship over the years without runtime components required on the original supported OS (or with required redistributable components that had to be separately installed from the distribution CD-ROM for no well-explained reason).

Alternatively, look it up by reading winetricks’ source code. Wait, would that be cheating considering that winetricks is a UNIX tool? Linux and UNIX systems in general are supposed to be harder, not easier, in comparison to Windows, right?

For those unable to tell, I am using sarcasm in that last part.

> I might as well point out that billions of people think otherwise of Linux.

These same billions, sans a very small fraction, don't even have "operating system" in their vocabulary. And as far as they are concerned, Chrome browser on one operating system is just as good as Chrome/Chromium on another operating system.

> Try installing a Linux program from 2005 with a UI made in any toolkit of your choice.

Personally I would not have difficulty doing this with containers. But there is no reason to do this at all. No sane and sober person wants this.

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