GNU/Linux:
- Can I install this 20yo software?
- Is already installed.
Can I install this 20yo software?
user is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reportedSUDO Can I install this 20yo software?
Is already installed.You guys are awesome!
how about this driver for an obscure 20yo laptop’s touchpad?
already installed
Had this exact scenario with an old flatbed scanner. No win10 drivers and it never had mac drivers. Ran without issue in up to date Mint.
Actually once recently I had problems because the wifi driver (b43) for the Dell Latitude D505 (2004) wasn’t in the live Boot environment (cause un-free).
huh. Did you end up using a ethernet cable then?
there is nothing to doIf you do
echo "3 6 * p" | dcin a terminal it’ll give you the result of 3x6, but thedcpart of that is software that was written probably between 1969 and 1971.Showed me 18 as a result.
That is crazy and cool! Thanks!
Old Linux software usually has to be completed from source anyway (uhh the effort) which essentially makes it future proof
Well, unfortunately there are sw inside windows that are even older
I know it’s a même but Linux isn’t that good for running old app that have a user interface. Old command line interface works perfectly but that’s mostly for developer.
windows make it available to everyone.
It’s one of the few things windows does better, might as well recognize it.
Old command line interface works perfectly but that’s mostly for developer.
No. I’m comfortable with command line tools, and I’m far from being a developer. People used DOS etc. as well without being developers.
25 year old Windows programs work better in Linux with wine than in Windows 🤣
Wine is the most stable ABI on Linux 😂
it got so extreme i installed wine on wsl to run a few old programs because windows 11 dropped support for some libraries
That’s absolutely hilarious and I don’t doubt it for a second.
What a fuckin lie. Can’t play some Windows 7 games on Windows 10 or above but on Linux it works.
I will always remember Battle For Middle Earth working first try on Linux after spending hours fighting with it on Windows
That game is a classic.
- “Can you run on this 20 y/o piece of hardware?”
- Linux: “hold my beer!”
Only if you use 15 years old distribution. Linux actually drops support of older hardware faster than Windows, it just doesn’t happen consistently. Old drivers are maintained by volunteers so if someone wants to spend their free time on a driver for 25 years old hardware then it will work. But the moment that single developer disappears or stops caring then this driver is booted from the kernel fast. Supporting old hardware isn’t the goal of Linux unless someone make it their goal (and core developers don’t care either way as long as it’s not their job).
I mean, tons of old drivers are on the repositories of major distros, you just have to install them. Just because it’s not in the kernel as pre-configured doesn’t mean you can’t just add it.
That’s never been my experience in the slightest.
Ah, jeez, it was just a joke.
Linux gang has entered the chat
Linux:
User: Can you install this 50 year old program?
Linux: it’s already installed
User: Linux can you install this software from this ancient obscure operating system?
Grep is from 1973 so yeah.
No you can’t because the dependency doesn’t exit anymore.
Have you heard to Good Word of our Lord and Savior, AppImage?
Then compile it from the sources
Yes because that is more user friendly than running an executable through a built in compatibility layer… suure
Who tf wants usability when shit just has a solution no matter what. Additionally its an old program that a normal person wouldn’t even try.
On windows shit just doesn’t work and the solutions are most of the time not even existing.
Tfw compatibility for some old Windows programs and games is better in Wine than in modern Windows
Most people will need internet connection to Google specific commands to run or install the most trivial things, and it won’t always work depending on what distro you’re using. Oh you’re using MX Linux? Goodluck downloading a Plex client installer and just clicking it to install. Maybe use Snap but then good luck creating a shortcut with just a right click.
Limux won’t replace Windows anytime soon, not if even enthusiasts need to Google almost everything.
Bold of you to think I’d install a Plex client when I can just stream video in my terminal with mplayer in glorious ASCII.
And why would you search the internet when there’s a manual built right in?
In my experience, Windows can install a 25 year old program, but it won’t work
Windows is def better than Mac for backwards compatibility, but nah dude it’s not even close to perfect. Ive had better luck using wine for old windows programs
Do current Windows versions even start anything that was compiled for pre-Vista? I thought they don’t?
Yes, you can start almost all 32 bit software in Windows 11.
Yes. It’s 16bit app support for win3.1/95 stuff that ran in the DOS layer that’s depreciated, but even then they’ll sometimes run.
We still have some ridiculous genetics algorithm running inside dosbox, of all things, in an App-V virtual environment deployed across a farm of hundreds of Citrix servers running inside various VMware hosts and published up to some geneticist freaks at the hospital I look after.
It’s absolutely insane…
Yes, you can run in windows compatibility
Not my experience. I’ve had multiple old games and an old printer that just straight up didn’t work under Windows. On Linux however (using wine for the windows exe’s) it usually does run. Sometimes it does require some googling, but there’s usually someone who tried it before.
Shouldnt window’s compatibility mode solve most of those?
Should, yes, but I find it often doesn’t.
Yeah, it’s a real hit and miss affair, that thing…
Games are actually the hardcore compatibility test. They are much less compatible than the average piece of software. That’s due to them using much more of the hardware/low-level-APIs of the OS, but also due to DRM and Anti-Cheat-Software (where applicable).
And printers are also (for some reason) super difficult. Probably because they are cheap, planned-obsolescence pieses of crap hardware, which are chock-full of DRM.
The spooler spanning userland a d kernel address space was never going to go well, either.
To be fair, it went a lot worse than people thought, but that’s probably because printers were cheap to produce and beancounters find programmers expensive
The last point is probably the biggest issue. Even if for some reason a prodigy embedded dev ended up working on super cheap HP printers, they wouldn’t get the time and budget to actually push the drivers/software/firmware past a barely working state.
And if there is more budget to burn, it will be allocated to DRM measures like blocking 3rd party ink.
More like “Installing… Do you want avast or X or Y installed along with it?” No thanks, I very much prefer Linux package managers.
Gonna be honest, this isn’t my experience, a lot of stuff just doesn’t work on Windows anymore
I can get those same programs to work fairly easily on linux though using Wine/Proton
Windows is 90% bloat, 9% library and 1% operational…
Sadly exactly that is the reason that windows is just a bunch of spaghetti code XD
What is spaghetti code? (Sorry am non coder)
Basically, spaghetti code is code that is poorly written or implemented.
Most of the time, companies can use newer technologies to replace or fix this bad code, but if the spaghetti code is still needed or in use, then it becomes too difficult or expensive to fix. So we end up with old, badly written and inefficient code and are stuck with it indefinitely.
Good example here being Windows. Some programs from over 20 years ago will still run on Windows 11, many companies rely on these older programs and Microsoft knows this. However, the systems written to allow these programs to run in Windows is usually seen as being bad code since it lacks a lot of the modern techniques programmers use to make things easier to work with and maintain over time. But these old systems cannot be changed or updated since they will then not work with those 20 year old programs that many companies rely on.
microsoft has tried to move everyone to a modern framework only. when they successfully have a win32/x86 emulator runnong smoothly they will gut a lot
And yet, Linux tools are even older and the kernel better written than either Windows or OSX.
Before flatpak Linux backwards compatibility was rough.
Most of which have to be recompiled to support newer libraries when the older libraries aren’t supported anymore. There’s a reason why package managers have to deal with dependency issues.
Do you have a source for the second half of your statement?
if that’s the case why do I still have to support XP as some shop floor measurement device still uses software from that, and window 7 for the database of greases then the likilhood is the windows 10 to windows 11 project is taking 6months planning of impact assessments. (pretty sure if we had let them the tool planning dept would still be running their windows 3.1 lotus suite
Holy run-on sentence. Also it sounds like it’s the measuring device that doesn’t support newer the newer OS, not the other way around. Also migrating a database is possible, it just takes a ton of work.
The third panel of that is LINUX: Can you install this 25 year old program?
It was already installed on there.
Cat is so old it should be dead by now… Guess it’s got nine lives 😅
