Where is the mess? Everywhere: sound, video, embedding, etc.

Posted Oct 27, 2008 7:57 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

No, Linux (the kernel) still supports the very first filesystem it had, and runs its very first binaries.

The very firstsystem? Did you mean very first filesystemS? There were two: ext1 and xiafs. Both are unsupported today. As for binaries... yes, "Hello world" runs, but real binaries fail routinely. Programs which iteract with hardware (floppy, CD, sound) are expecially fragile.

OTOH, I once bought a MSFT game, and it did not run on the next version of Windows. Just the splash screen showed, then complete hang.

What was the name of the game and what did you do to make it work? I've found that most games can be persuaded to work in the next version of Windows if you'll just remove what copy protection software they are using. That's not a Windows problem: copy protection creators go far beyond spec.

Look, I'm not saying Windows compatibility is 100% sure thing. But Microsoft thinks about compatibility! Compare with Linux: yes, there exist the way to properly support sound in old program. But it's still unmerged - six years after ALSA introduction! You can be 100% sure Microsoft will never tolerate such a huge breach of continuity. You can be 100% sure such transtion layer will be developed and introduced alongside the new interface, not some years after the fact when poor sound support will start to really hurt Linux reputation.

Yes, I do want my programs to run on the next (and then some) Fedora. Usually that means that they got recompiled (by my distribution or somebody else, even myself) on the way. I very rarely have any use for year-old binaries (except for some self-written programs that I just copied over and am still running as 32 bits on this 64 bits, mostly out of lazyness).

Yes, that typical Linux user attitude. But Windows user are accustomed to much longer support times. And for binaries, not for source. Some companies are still using 10-15 years old programs written in Visual Basic 2 for Windows 3.1 (that's one reason as to why Windows for x86-64 is not such a big hit: you can not use Windows 3.x programs there).

And where I do need to run old binaries, I use a "enterprise" distribution; there I have a very much longer guarantee than on any Windows I've seen.

Have you actually used Enterprise Windows? Let's compare, shell we:
Windows2000: introduced in 2000 (duh), EOL July 13, 2010
RHEL2.1: introduced in 2002, EOL May 31, 2009
Windows2003: introduced in 2003 (duh), EOL July 14, 2015
RHEL4: introduced in 2005, EOL February 29, 2012
RHEL5: introduced in 2007, EOL March 31, 2014
Windows2008: introduced in 2008 (duh), EOL October 07, 2018
Sorry, but if you'll compare enterprise Linux distributions with what Microsoft is offering... you'll find Linux sorely lacking. RHEL and Ubuntu LTS fall far short of what the Microsoft is offering where SLES is barely matching it (but if I wanted an Microsoft-controlled OS I'd used Windows). Don't try to rebuff FUD with FUD of your own - it backfires.

P.S. Note: I'm not saying Linux is hopeless. On the contrary: Linux is slowly moving in right direction. But to fix the problem you first must admit yet. Sadly Linux developers tend to ignore it and blow up every time points it out. That's not the way to win ISVs and users.