This just tells me Windows is on a level with Linux + Wine, with the compatibility mode.

> All the 25 years of code is still in Windows 11 they just hide it with a lick of paint.

That's not true. Windows had a big, discontinuous shift when they abandoned the DOS-centric Windows codebase in the move to XP.

You have it backwards: Microsoft values backwards compatibility in Windows so much it's eccentric.

Game consoles are a hit or miss whether they implement any form of backwards compatibility with previous hardware, and the concept of backwards compatibility in the world of personal computing in anything other than Windows flat out does not exist.

We (as in common and power users) are very, very fortunate Microsoft cares about Windows backwards compatibility so much, but by no means is such an attitude the industry norm. The industry norm is: Code fast and break shit, maybe fix later.

I still boot an XP partition from time to time. To play old games that simply run with issues in more modern Windows. The issue is XP had the right APIs for game development, and then MS deprecated some great technologies in favour of XBox centered ones.

In new games I still miss the hardware accelerated positional audio XP has.

That's a really low bar.

Isn't Windows supposed to have a legendary commitment to backwards compatibility? 3 years of backwards compatibility would be nice for a bleeding-edge development environment like node.js that you can tear down and replace whenever you want, but not for your operating system shell.

I have seen nearly no software that doesn't work in a backwards compatible way on windows. Tha's the thing microsoft does best of all.

What was it that became incompatible with Win8 that meant a piece of software that installed on Win7 now wouldn't install?

The last app that stopped working for me was some 16bit vb apps I had but those run just fine in a virtual 32bit XP I can fire up (and in the "xp mode" when that was availble).

You do realize that the reason MS was derided for that is because MS doesn't believe in backwards compatibility at all, right? They updated their API completely, which broke Simcity, then they went and added hacks to make it run. They had two more correct options. Either tell Maxis that it's their problem and that they needed to fix it, or actually maintain backwards compatibility.

Linux strives to maintain backwards compatibility, unless they absolutely must break it. This means that you maintain buggy behavior if it's used commonly. I work on multiplatform code, and moving to new Linux versions is almost trivially simple for us-99% of the time, we just have to turn on the new compiler and OS combination, and just build it. Most of the time, any actual porting efforts are done because there are new OS features that we can leverage for performance.

Who are you including in that category apart from Apple? Compatibility with 30-year-old OS features is often considered a worthwhile goal among current UNIX descendants.

> I see very few people complaining that Apple killed the PowerPC line, and XP far predates that.

Is WinXP compatible with x86 and x86-64? Is Win7 not compatible with those? I don't see what point you're making by mentioning CPU architectures. And the 'universal binary' made this switch largely transparent to owners of either CPU.

> many people hold the misapprehension that XP is 'good enough' in some sense

Leaving aside the accuracy of this, surely if it is a misapprehension then it should cause problems only for those people. Instead Microsoft have made it clear that it's a problem for their own profit growth and that those users need to be coerced into upgrading.

But even that's being done in a half-assed way that makes it more of a problem for web developers. Which other Microsoft titles are being developed to be XP-incompatible? Certainly not Office 2010. Aside: backwards compatibility was largely maintained under Mac OS Classic from 1984 to 2001. The break, coming with OS X, was necessary, not contrived.

Microsoft is nearly pathalogic in this. I still run some programs I bought for DOS today on Windows 10, because they're COM files. Still works the same.

Apple has always broken things on the other hand, but with the promise of a stable system. Which, having upgraded to High Sierra, is long gone. This feels almost like the early days of Linux. I've got WiFi breakage, graphics driver breakage, occasional filesystem breakage, and several really concerning CVEs that have come over the last few months.

Never thought I'd see the day when I call Windows more stable than a *nix.

Indeed. This is one of the few points that I give high marks to Microsoft for, and when it comes to Windows, is the only thing that makes me feel sympathy for Microsoft devs.

Pulling off the level of backward compatibility that Windows has maintained for so long is an incredible accomplishment.

It's precisely because of that backwards compatibility, insane in both the workings and the result, that keeps most people using Windows.

People use computers to get stuff done, and Windows lets people use the absolutely massive library of Windows programs whether it was written today or over 30 years ago.

The hardware part in the old days maybe - they have solved that problem. I am not sure beyond people's opinions there are any real issues directly attributable to backwards s/w compatibility.

I think it is worth discussing the counter arguement.

My team supported Windows from XP to Windows 10. I continued to be staggered at the backwards compatibility of it. I remember having an ERP client that was written in VB6, and nobody thought it would run on 7, but it did. Everyone assumed it was obvious it wouldn't run on 10...but it did... with less RAM usage and it was a bit snappier. Same with the ancient copies of WordPerfect and Photoshop (old enough that they came in a box).

I had a mixed fleet of machines from very old to very new and Windows 10 ran on all of them. I bet it would run on this guys P4 just fine. That is extraordinary isn't it? MS have a current commercial OS that will run on 30 year old hardware!

Before we criticise MS too much, let us compare that to other commercial providers...like Apple for instance. How much of your 1990's software runs on the last gen Intel Macs even? Answer is...none, isn't it?

I hate Windows these days, but the specific AMD video card in my gaming desktop has buggy drivers in Linux and reliably crashes the whole machine about once every four hours (or, much faster if I actually play a game on it—that's if I'm just web browsing and hanging out in terminals and such) versus my having had zero OS-level crashes on the same hardware over almost three years under Windows 10. So... Windows it is.

IDK, the driver may be fixed now, but the bug had been outstanding for 18+ months when I encountered it, so, I wouldn't bet on it. It seemed to have very little traction. And at this point it's really not worth my time to try, since the machine's working OK as-is, aside from Windows being crap.

Since all I do on Windows is game, having to avoid some ads isn't that big a deal. I spend nearly all my time on it in fullscreen programs anyway, hardly interacting with Windows at all.

So it's "great" in that it actually works correctly on my hardware, and ~all my games work just as they should. It's shit in every other way, but if it's effectively just a game launcher, oh well. I do anything important on other operating systems.

Yes, that is indeed a strong point. They place great emphasis on upgrading your Windows being a no-brainer, instead of a potentially risky decision.

(As developers we dislike the ugly technical compromises that brings. But the consumer benefit is definitely there.)

Btw, the Linux kernel people are also quite fanatical about not breaking user space. But the rest of the Linux ecosystem ain't.

See https://www.computerworld.com/article/2821929/torvalds-patch...

All 64 bit versions of Windows can neither run DOS applications nor Win16 applications (I described the technical reason for this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14246521).

Well, if they hadn't made both Vista and Windows 8 such piles of fail perhaps Microsoft wouldn't have had this problem.

Lots of people stayed with XP for a very good reason ... drivers for hardware that worked reliably for better than a decade simply wouldn't work with Vista.

Similarly lots of people are staying with Windows 7 for very good reasons ... Windows 7 was actually decent, Windows 8 sucks, and Windows 10 is a resource pig which someone who hasn't upgraded a computer in 3-5 years can't run.

I think this seems true only because of Microsoft. I cannot recall any other major OS spending so much effort on backward compatibility.

Huh? If you mean "gaming on Windows", I can't imagine how that could possibly be true, and if they tried, either nobody got the memo or they did a really bad job at trying. PC gaming has always been defacto Windows gaming. If you mean "Windows Games", that's still a thing, they're just integrating closer with their XBox platform, which makes perfect sense given that XBox is integrating closer with Windows 10 from the other side.

> they tried to kill Firefox

So did Google (they're still trying). So did Apple. Are you holding grudges against either of them?

> Their operating system design is nearly abusive

Heavily subjective. Windows has had its regressive moments, but overall it's consistently been more usable than anything on the market. 95 was a joy, 98 was a joy, XP was a joy, Vista was bad, 7 was a joy, 8 was bad, 10 is amazing. Compare that to MacOS* which only started competing with OSX and peaked at 10.5 (Leopard) and has been basically going slowly downhill since, with regressive behaviors, hostility to anyone that doesn't want to live in their walled garden, hostility to legacy software (many Windows XP programs still run perfectly with explicit compatibility settings, meanwhile OSX barely supports apps that are built for 3 major releases back-- that's only 3 years of support) and deprecation/removal of core OS APIs with zero intention to replace them. You want abusive? Try developing on a platform that competes against its own developer community and keeps APIs private for competitive advantage. Try developing on a platform that strong-arms you into paying yearly fees just so you can deploy applications that work out of the box on client machines. Comparatively, Apple has been much more hostile to developer communities than Microsoft ever has.

> I want nothing more than for them to disappear

Clear indication of an unhealthy long-kept grudge. Even if Microsoft has done all the things you claim, you don't really have a moral high ground if you're sitting there rooting for their failure. You can feel free to not use their products, but to want them and all of their customers to fail because you don't like what they've done in the past isn't really a "moralistic" viewpoint, it's just brooding.

...and you're going to have to move past the brooding if you want to make it to Acceptance.

I feel like MS had mostly quashed these problems with XP - it was certainly not bug-free, but after a few years was a solid enough platform many used it all the way to (and probably past) its EoL in 2014.