One of the greatest advantages of windows over Linux is great retro compatibility.
One practical example. Lots of people with old Nvidia cards cannot use linux simply because propietary drivers do not run on modern linux kernels, because at some point in the past 5 years the linux kernel decided to change some API making the old libraries unusable. So at that point there’s only two options, or the software gets patched (which won’t happen with legacy software), or distro maintainers keep maintaining the old kernel manually applying security parches to it without changing the API, which happens but only for some time. With windows the system API is the same since ancient times, so you can easily run ancient software on it, as is it the case for old Nvidia drivers.
It’s just a constructive criticism to Linux, I wish it would be more stable with the system APIs to ensure old software could keep running without patches.
Flatpak has issues. Distributing libraries with games and forgetting about them is a security nightmare. The proper solution would be either API versioning or wine-like translation layer that translates old API calls to modern ones.
I despise Microsoft but it’s not something bad.
One of the greatest advantages of windows over Linux is great retro compatibility.
One practical example. Lots of people with old Nvidia cards cannot use linux simply because propietary drivers do not run on modern linux kernels, because at some point in the past 5 years the linux kernel decided to change some API making the old libraries unusable. So at that point there’s only two options, or the software gets patched (which won’t happen with legacy software), or distro maintainers keep maintaining the old kernel manually applying security parches to it without changing the API, which happens but only for some time. With windows the system API is the same since ancient times, so you can easily run ancient software on it, as is it the case for old Nvidia drivers.
It’s just a constructive criticism to Linux, I wish it would be more stable with the system APIs to ensure old software could keep running without patches.
Sometimes it’s ok to stop maintaining old code to improve the state of the codebase
It’s completely insane that none of my native Linux games work anymore, while under Proton all windows apps work just fine
I’ve been saying for a bit now that Linux games should be distributed via flatpak or similar to mitigate this problem.
Flatpak has issues. Distributing libraries with games and forgetting about them is a security nightmare. The proper solution would be either API versioning or wine-like translation layer that translates old API calls to modern ones.