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Comment by RKearney | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about you, but I have much, much better luck running executables under Windows than say Linux or OS X.

Microsoft puts a ton of work into keeping backwards compatibility. You can watch the YouTube Video[0] of someone upgrading through every Windows version (well, most?). OS X users have to figure out if they need that Intel or PPC binary, or maybe just the larger universal one and call it a day. Then there's not being able to run any of their older PPC-only apps once Apple removed Rosetta from OS X.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14

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> OS X users have to figure out if they need that Intel or PPC binary, or maybe just the larger universal one and call it a day

This hasn't been an issue for years. Since Rosetta was killed off in 2011 you really don't see any UB/PPC apps around.

Guess what. OS X users upgrade their system much faster than win-users. That leads to developers not wasting time to support old OS X and focus on the new one, with new APIs.

> OS X users have to figure out if they need that Intel or PPC binary, or maybe just the larger universal one and call it a day.

Whoa, how is life in 2006?

>Then there's not being able to run any of their older PPC-only apps once Apple removed Rosetta from OS X.

I would like an example of the app that you absolutely want to run.

> Microsoft puts a ton of work into keeping backwards compatibility.

Usually MS fails at it. Upgrading to win 8 made me furious because apps stopped working. I still remember time when I had to dual-boot win 98 and xp in order to play pre-xp games.

Which programs didn't work for you under Windows 8? Just curious, I haven't hit one yet.

I haven't used Windows 8, but Microsoft's documentation says that IFilter support was removed[1] in Windows 8, so search engine software, document clustering software, etc. that relied on IFilter to extract text from various file formats is probably dead.

1 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms691105(v=vs.85).as...

Start menu 8 and other start menu replacements do not work in windows 8.1 (windows blue). They have deliberately sabotaged these utility programs.

Those programs are very dependent on how Explorer initialises the task bar, in what order messages are posted and how controls are named or laid out. It's not exactly a surprise that those things stop working, given that the program digs around in another program's internals. Besides, Windows 8.1 brings its own start button, so those programs have to be adjusted anyway to account for that.

Fun read: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/12/23/45481...

Most excellent old games that used to work fine on XP don't work anymore on Windows 8 (Stronghold, Thief, Warlords battlecry 2...) or only after long hours of tinkering.

USB ports not working. It's a common fault. I had to install win8 from scratch. I lost a lot of things.. A lot of software wouldn't install under win8, but it had worked when i first upgraded.

>I would like an example of the app that you absolutely want to run.

The only case I have ever come across of an OS X app that depends on rosetta is one of my clients upgrading to a retina MacBook Pro 15" when she ran a decade old, macro heavy, film production bidding spreadsheet in Office X. Got Snow Leopard in a VM for her and she's on her merry way.

iMovie from 2005 to retrieve a very old iMovie project.

> I would like an example of the app that you absolutely want to run.

Old versions of Photoshop. Lots of stuff. I'm so glad that practically zero businesses run Macs because Apple really does suck at backwards compatibility- and as a business programmer, I'm just glad that I don't have to deal with all that. Maybe that's why businesses don't really use them? It probably has more to do with the hardware lock-in though honestly.

Making old business software run on current Windows is a breeze. My parents even ran their old DOS accounting package on Windows for their small business - all the way up through Windows XP and then they retired altogether.

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