linuxmemes

“Just run it in compatibility mode bro, it’s fine bro!!!”

My computer screen suddenly turns 640x480, flickers 5 times, then crashes because -checks notes- my graphics drivers are too new.

Yes this has actually happened to me. No I can’t remember with what game (I wanna say Deadly Premonition).

Yea, there's a lot of (well deserved) shitting on Windows, but it's backwards compatibility is second to none. Not even Linux can give you a >70% chance that a piece of software or game you need/want from 1995 will still run (provided it's not 16bit only or needs a proprietary driver lmao) on a modern version of the OS

Months ago I wanted to run a lot of my old childhood games (mostly between 94 and 2001 release dates) for my own kids and I found most of them still installed and ran right out of the box on fully updated Win10, a lot of the rest required some fiddling with compatibility settings and the rest just didn't work because they were 16 bit only (You can still get them working natively if you install 32 bit Win10, but subjecting children to <4gb RAM is abuse) or some other weird issue so I fell back to ScummVM/DosBox for those

The saying "the most stable ABI on Linux is win32" says that's also true for Linux software unfortunately