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Comment by nvarsj | Hacker News Reader

One positive point as the article points out is compatibility. This is the single reason Windows remains the staple of industry software, across almost all industries. It's particularly relevant in light of recent Mac OS X dropping 32-bit support. There are a lot of professionals whose livelihood depends on these older apps that either will never be updated or will take a very long time to do so.

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I bet Wine is actually more compatible than Windows itself. Especially if you just look at software up to the Windows 7 era. Can you run Windows 3.1 programs on a modern 64-bit OS? With Wine it can be done.

I think a bet you would loose :). Wine is an awesome project but 100 devs vs 10.000 devs is not fair on an API surface as big as Win32.

The Wine devs don't have to spend time on stuff like telemetry and ads. And they only need to replicate a tiny sliver of Windows' UIs.

This doesn't matter for 99% of the population.

Does not for 99% of consumers (only because of browsers) and does matter for 75% of business users (reduced by 24% because of browsers)

TBH, the majority of the laundry list in the original article is irrelevant for 99% of the population.

Windows isn't perfect on this, I've had to update software for the transitions from NT to 2000, 2000 to XP, XP to Vista and 8 to 8.1 and also for 64 bit support. Mostly because my app has driver level code.

I agree to an extent, but exactly how far back should we go in terms of backward compatibility? Should we expect modern software or hardware to support 16-bit?

For businesses, as far back as they need. Consumers don't care, and for consumer grade OS it's fine. Let's say I invest 1 million in machines that use 32-bit software for my professional studio, and it's working perfectly fine. Then Apple decides one day to remove 32-bit support. The vendor is small and can't easily afford to port their software over to 64-bit. And for what reason? It was working fine from the start. It makes me believe that Windows is the only real professional/industry grade OS.

Note that I am primarily a Linux user, but I know people in industries whose entire business relies on the fact that Windows will never brick their old software that has been going for 20 years. And if I was using that software, I would pick the Windows version any day.

The assumption here is that you have to upgrade to the newest OS (on your old hardware). I'd challenge that assumption. If your software is ancient and unsupported and you're willing to accept that security risk, using an unsupported operating system isn't going to increase your attack surface that much more than running out of date software was. OS level attacks are less common than serialization bugs in your client software leading to RCE leading to ransomware et al.

And if you're not updating your OS for security reasons, is it for feature updates? If your OS and machines are there any to run specific software, this shouldn't be a problem. If it's working fine, leave it be. Mitigate your attack surface through a number of schemes like physically isolating vulnerable workstations and disabling all unnecessary services.

I'm not advocating running unpatched OSes, but given how in my experience doing penetration testing most exploitable vulnerabilities are in some 3rd party client software (excluding OS misconfigurations), if your software is unmaintained, running the last working OS release doesn't seem like that much worse of a leap.

In Apple's case, if you're maintaining your software, making the 32->64 bit transition should be pretty painless in this day and age, unless you're using the Carbon API created as a way to port legacy Mac programs to the new NeXT based Mac OS X. It never received a 64 bit version since Mac went 64 bit in 2007 and has been officially deprecated since 2012.

Software platforms can't stay frozen in time and can't hang back forever. Microsoft struggles tremendously to maintain its tired backwards compatibility while juggling security and feature updates; see Google's project zero report on the CTF subsystem and how a fundamental design flaw in the Text Services Framework allows easy bypass of user sessions and sandboxes. Fixing the bug will invariably break correctly implemented old software.

Well, that's enough rambling for now...

I don't think getting updates for professional software has been a problem, it's mostly utilities and games.

For goodness sake, you can run classic Mac in the browser

https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/

What could prevent MS from developing an emulation layer?

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