this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Windows is pretty good with backwards compatibility, probably the best out of anything. I can run Visual Basic apps I wrote in the early 2000s on Windows 11 and they still run fine. Some old 32-bit games work fine too. You can even run some 16-bit Windows 3.0 apps on 32-bit Windows 10 if you manually install NTVDM through the Windows features (it was never ported to 64-bit though)
Linux is okay for backcompat but I'm not sure an app I compiled 20 years ago would still run today.
Tell that to video games, which constantly need a compat mode enabled
The fact that a compat mode exists means that Microsoft put effort into backwards compatibility. Windows even emulates some old bugs for old popular apps that depended on them. I don't think any other OS does that.
I don’t like Microsoft Windows at all, but you are absolutely right about doing a good job with backwards compatibility.
Linux isn’t so backwards compatible, but with much of it having open source code, you can often compile it again yourself—tho having been written in a language that offers good backwards compatibility also helps.