It's the other way around. Windows 11 runs binaries from the Windows 95 era (like Office '98). Linux doesn't come close.

I just upgraded my home server to Ubuntu 24.04 (the old install had a /boot partition that was too small so I wiped the SSD and imported the ZFS array with the important files)

   sudo apt-get install X

didn't work for numerous packages I tried to install and I had to apply various workarounds (like using a third party script to install my Ubiquiti controller, hacking a few service files, etc.) It wasn't too bad but I had no trouble at all installing all my Win 10 software on Win 11.

(Funny Microsoft's Copilot is great at helping with Linux sysadmin but poor at Windows admin!)

Be fair, now. Most of those Windows 95 binaries run just fine on Linux too =-)

> It wasn't too bad but I had no trouble at all installing all my Win 10 software on Win 11.

Let me guess - you weren't using that Windows 10 machine as a Ubiquiti controller were you?

I think it is a brain-damaged decision on their part to use mongodb [1] when SQLlite would have been trouble free for what they're doing.

[1] maybe it is always a brain damaged decision to use mongodb

The linux kernel will have the same syscalls as the older ones with some added. But with tools like docker, the old software should be runnable if the source isn't available. Not that I would ask a non-expert to do that.

Right glibc does, but with containers this isn't really an issue for getting it to work, just include the correct version of the deps. The issue is security at that point though as it's unsupported software now. The libraries going up do to. And again, these are expert friendly features at this point, I think. I don't know of any software to make old linux software work.

I know my case is unusual but I've had terrible experiences with containers.

Back when I had 2 Mbps DSL I frequently downloaded multi-GB files, I just used download managers and waited.

I could never get anything to work with Docker back then because Docker Hub was unreliable, so consistently reliable that it probably had some timeout that made it impossible to use with a slow connection. I guess reliability is a "call sales" kind of feature for Docker.

I have 10x the speed now, but when I wanted to try the Danbooru image board software locally I was told to use "docker compose" which didn't work because I had the wrong version of compose. Maybe I could switch back to an old version of compose, but would that break some other container thing running on my server that I don't know about? Maybe I could update the compose file to a new version but really it seemed better to hack my RSS reader into an image sorter than go down that rabbit hole.

At one place I worked management thought Docker was an answer to the Python morass but all I saw it do was speed up the ability of the data sci's to find unimaginably broken Python distributions. Docker lets you run 20 microservices that depend on 20 different versions of their environment but in the end now you have to deal with 20 different versions of the environment. Docker alone is chaos, docker + discipline is OK, but the discipline without Docker is also OK. It's the discipline that matters.

I think debian publishes their rootfs build docs. But, that's kind of my point on it only really being expert friendly right now. Maybe it's easier to make a flatpak or snap, but I don't know.

In a few weeks debian will release its latest version trixie. The chances are high that everything will work out without problems.

> Linux doesn't come close.

> Ubuntu 24.04

I'm sorry, but Ubuntu isn't representative of Linux, hasn't been for a long, long time, so it's a pretty poor choice as an example.

Any seasoned Linux veteran would tell you to avoid it like the plague. 24.04 in particular is extremely buggy, or at least it was when it was first released. See: https://youtu.be/g1__qfYXtv0

Also, regardless of the distro you pick, your experience will vary quite a bit when installing packages, especially when it comes to package availability and dependency handling. So your "apt-get install X" command (or it's equivalent) may work just fine on one distro, but not the other. So once again, the result you obtain won't be a representative of "Linux" as a whole.

Finally, try running the original Rogue Squadron for example in Win11 (without applying any patches) and let me know how it goes. (it works fine in Linux under Wine by the way.)

How long has ELF been around? Won't static ELF binaries still run?

So! It is! 2025 will be the year of Linux on the desktop?

[ ] Yes! [ ] No! [ ] Maybe?!

:D