"One of the big concerns of anyone considering moving to Windows Vista is 'How many of my applications will work on Windows Vista?' We have spent a lot of time trying to answer that very question for our company so I will share with you some of the common problem areas we found for applications to help give you an idea of what applications might have problems for you."
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Member since:2005-06-30
Don't talk about what you don't understand please. The change you're talking about, that forced to rebuild everything, is 9 years old !!! So you call 9 years old "change SO much", are you stupid ?
Nothing has to be custom build like you imply, this is just BS. As long as you are on the same arch, or you compile for the generic one (i386, ppc, ...) , you can put your app on every distro you want.
FYI, that's how some Linux games are distributed.
That also means I can put my binaries on a distro of the same or superiror arch (or vice versa) and it will work without problem.
As long as your binaries are statically linked. It gets very ugly with dynamic linking.
The interfaces for gcc and glibc keep changing. It's not wrong or bad, it's just the way it is. Since they are mostly used with open-source projects, it's not a big issue for these users.
As for what you call BS, well... I doubt you could install Debian potato packages on etch. It can work, but it doesn't always work. Likewise, there is a reason why there are packages for RH8, RH9, FC2 or SuSE 9, SuSE 9.1, etc. Personally, I have a Gentoo server and I have to do a dependency checkup after installing a new glibc. That checkup is recompiling a few packages that no longer work... and I am not using ricey flags. Last, but not the least: I have old programs (1997) that I cannot compile with newer GCC versions. It isn't a real issue to me, but backward compatibility is often set aside for better implementations.
In a nutshell, the parent poster exagerrated a bit, but I would not discredit it completely.
Member since:
2005-11-14
I'm not really sure why this is such a big deal? Its a brand new OS shipped something like 6-7 years after the last release
Because people bought or got apps and they want them to still work if they have to change OS version.
As you want to talk Linux, some apps predates Linux and still work on it (that's 15+ years).
GCC libraries change SO much that Linux applications basically have to be custom built for every distro and every release
Don't talk about what you don't understand please. The change you're talking about, that forced to rebuild everything, is 9 years old !!! So you call 9 years old "change SO much", are you stupid ?
Nothing has to be custom build like you imply, this is just BS. As long as you are on the same arch, or you compile for the generic one (i386, ppc, ...) , you can put your app on every distro you want.
FYI, that's how some Linux games are distributed.
That also means I can put my binaries on a distro of the same or superiror arch (or vice versa) and it will work without problem.
Windows has had nearly perfect backwards compatiblity since the days of Windows 3.0, so give them a break!
This is BS, I have piles of games that don't work anymore, there are piles of enterprise apps that don't work correctly or at all on Win2000 and Win2003, so much that you have versions tailored for NT4, Win2000, Win2003. That's not what I call "nearly perfect".