"Installing... done! Now please try out every single compatibility option and weird workarounds like starting the DOS version in an emulator!"
I always thought it was pretty cool that Linux literally has software/utilities originally made in the 60's but it's still working/useful nowadays.
It works both way, too. Assuming you do not deploy systemd, you can install the very latest kernel, released two days ago, on a computer built in the 80s - long before pentium CPUs even existed, as well as almost the entirety of a modern distribution.
Using legacy repositories for specific XFree86 versions, this even includes supporting old displays - including monochrome ones.
Fwiw macOS has a lot of those too, it's based off BSD which is why it's frequently used for programming
lol, as if Windows could ever run a 25-year old program. I have had 100x more success (and less CPU use) running any Windows program/game older than 15 years on Wine in Linux than on Windows.
Crash bandicoot came out in 1996 and the N Sane trilogy works just fine, same with doom in 1993 and doom eternal runs like butter, so I mean I dunno seems okay to me....
Th-this is a bit, right? Those releases are.. modern.. dangit, I'm immediately so confused.
Alright, I get it, games are no metric; I had Microsoft office 95 back in those days and now I got Microsoft 365 no probs, plus I had outlook all those years ago and now I still got outlook soooooo.....you know, may be I'm just like a bit of tech wizard here, I get it, not everyone's a wiz, some are just casual users, I get it, I get it. Takes some tinkering, but you get it working in the end.
If you followed the best practices of the time, along the lines of the Charles Petzold "Programming Windows" book, there's a decent chance the program will still work. Problems is there was virtually no QC at the time, a lot of programs written by babies in Visual Basic, a lot of hacks, and a lot of weird drivers, and very few modern standards when it comes to internet protocols, file formats, and user permissions.
Inaccurate.
When you download software for Linux you dont get a script that installs the 12 internal parts of a program, you get 12 lines to paste into the command line. And 3 don't work, and you have no idea what any of them mean.
I've said this before but I installed Linux on my computer and had the repeated experience of following installation instructions for programs and having to install dependencies that weren't mentioned in the instructions - but those dependencies had their own missing dependencies that also weren't mentioned in those installation instructions.
I successfully did this a few times because I know how to use Google and accurately follow instructions. I work with computers for a living and I have done basic programming. I'm not a dummy about this sort of thing.
And I'm running Ubuntu, the most basic/popular distro, not some cut-down lite OS or something.
It is a huge fucking hassle. Not having spent the last 15 years using linux, I don't know what "sp rn ln instpkg - 0" means and so it's a blind dive down the rabbit hole trying to replicate rote steps written by, well, the type of person who writes software for Linux. I got the distinct impression that "it's already installed" is true of their machine but not mine.
I've not used Ubuntu in like a decade, but what the heck are you installing that you've ever had to worry about that nonsense? Fedora/Debian is my goto, and it comes with a software store that will install 95% of things you want with a single click. The rest are downloads that take two clicks.
Playing a lot of different games that definitely work in Linux, and launchers for those games, etc. The one I completely gave up on was an AI image generator but that's probably for the best lmao
Actually, windows 8/10/11 users have been reporting new issues with installing ancient software.
Switched to Linux at first when my old laptops drivers weren't supported in Win 10. Linux Mint worked, drivers and all, out of the box.
The main pitfall with vintage compatibility on Linux is package managers. While package managers make system-wide updates trivial, several distributions have been around for two decades now, and there are NOT comprehensive archives of every version of every package that has ever been available from these repositories. If you come across a binary package built for 2002-era Fedora or Debian (or a distribution of similar vintage), you might have a rather difficult time getting it to run. Those dependencies may not even exist anymore even in archives. The original source code can probably be tracked down, but you are well into a retro computing adventure at this point.
