On Thursday 24 August 2006 19:01, Alexey Eremenko wrote:
On Windows you have basically about 90% of backwards compatibility. That is 9 out of 10 programs will run on newer versions of Windows unmodified. If there was a requirement to rewrite *all* Windows 98 software to be able to run on XP,
In a sense there was. The windows 98 programs you could run in XP didn't actually use XP, they used a compatibility subsystem. Not entirely unlike shipping compat- libraries in linux I think you exaggerate the incompatibilities. Many, many programs can run unchanged on virtually any linux system. Witness opera, openoffice, mozilla, Quake 3 Arena, the Loki games, unreal Tournament, the Icculus software, and many many more. There have been problems with libc5 -> libc6, and a multitude of c++ ABI changes causing programs to become incompatible with the latest versions of libraries, but usually they can be (and have been) fixed by including compatibility libraries
By the time new version of Linux is out - only what the distro members/developers decided to include exists. A few third-party repositories helps, but not solves the problem as like with Windows.
Which part of Adobe Acrobat Reader did you have to upgrade to go from 10.0 to 10.1? Did your old version of flash stop working? Perhaps the java you downloaded from sun suddenly failed? No, it's not quite as bad as you make it out to be. Things can be better, but it's not quite the edge of oblivion