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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

> Windows would never sacrifice it's backwards compatibility.

I wish I could believe this, but the way Windows has been trending since 10 leaves me skeptical that the old Windows philosophies of catering to the user, keeping things consistent, and being backwards compatible are being smothered by whoever the fuck is working on it today.

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Because a large portion of Windows' target market is people who are technically unsophisticated, and who will blame Microsoft if an application misbehaves after a Windows upgrade (regardless of whether the application vendor is actually at fault), Microsoft goes to extraordinary lengths to ensure backwards compatibility, even to the point of adding dummy code that allows [poorly-written programs that abuse features in Windows X] to still work in Windows X + 1, even when those features aren't there anymore.

- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030828-00/?p=42...

- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050118-00/?p=36...

- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20051026-44/?p=33...

- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060109-27/?p=32...

- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060110-17/?p=32...

- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20070723-00/?p=25...

- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20200526-00/?p=10...

Notice that only one of those articles is set later than 2007, and that the one later article is about telling the customer to buck up and deal with the broken backwards compatibility.

They had an incredible focus on backwards compatibility. That no longer seems to be the case.

They still do. I have Win95 games that were broken in WinXP but started working in Win7 x64, or ones that broke in Win7 x64 and started working again in Win10.

I'm having the opposite experience, I tried playing an old DirectX 9 game the other day and it was unplayable in Windows. It did at least boot and menus worked fine, but for some reason for another the framerate in-game was so low it was unplayable. A few days later I tried it on my linux machine with Wine and it was perfect (thank god for DXVK).

dgVoodoo is great for old DirectX games: http://dege.freeweb.hu/

thats not true, plenty of games needed win 10 support. like blizzard games (diablo (2), warcraft (3), etc.) and many others even age of empires 1/2 needed to support windows 10 via patches and did not work out of the box.

It definitely varies by game, but that's always been the case. One of the games I mentioned was broken by XP but fixed by Windows 7.

"Works for me (TM)"

Windows Desktop Evangelism playbook hasn't changed since 2000.

The Windows 2000 / ME debacle appeared to be the breaking point when Microsoft realized they needed to adopt a more Apple-like approach to evolving the platform.

Perfect backwards compatibility means a perfect inability to fix any mistakes of the past.

With UAC and WDM -> WDF, they finally established an intent to deprecate older (and insecure / poorly-designed) functionality.

That said, imho, the user-mode / UI/X compatibility is an absolute !*&$ show with respect to predictability. Especially in the "utility program -> app" transition, wherein the latter still aren't feature-complete. Whoever PMs over those teams should be fired.

By curious coincidence, Windows just threw me this: https://i.imgur.com/iUWoHOw.png

It's disabled the VirtualBox install that I've been running for a year or so with no issues, on the basis that it's "old software".

This certainly shows the true face of the new Microsoft.

Sometimes I wonder where the world of computers would have been if it had not been for Microsoft doing all this stuff! This is seriously next level of customer support, which we hardly get to appreciate, let alone know about.

Windows has always been two creatures that behave in very different ways. The server line is where you see stability and compatibility reign supreme.

On the desktop/workstation line though, let's take a trip down memory lane and remember all these upgrades together: Windows 3.11 -> 95 -> 98 -> Me -> XP -> Vista -> 7 -> 8 -> 10.

I am having a really hard time seeing how one can infer from that timeline that Microsoft's desktop OS line follows a philosophy of "catering to the user, keeping things consistent, and being backwards compatible." Windows 98 didn't cause much hassle, but, at least from my experience, that was really it. Windows 7 had its share of hassles, too. Particularly, as I recall, in the backwards compatibility department. We just remember it fondly because it was sandwiched in between Windows Vista and Windows 8.

3.11 to 95 was a big shift in terms of how the interface worked, but after that it was pretty damned consistent until 8 tried to turn everything into a tablet.

The introduction of WDDM along with the new sound and networking driver architectures caused some headache in Vista, but were ultimately significant improvements over the way things had been.

10, on the other hand, made automatic updates mandatory, and pushed itself on everybody through dark patterns. It puts ads in the start menu and on the lock screen. It started, but didn't finish, implementing new interfaces nobody asked for while deprecating the old ones they still hand't entirely replicated. Today, they're doing their damnedest to hide the fact that you don't need a Microsoft account to set up your computer.

We should - though - definitely appreciate the fact that they still "let" you setup a workstation without signing in to a Microsoft account (unlike iOS, the new Oculus device etc.)

You can most definitely setup an iOS device without signing into iCloud, same as you don't need to use a Google account for an Android device.

macOS is also quite a capable workstation OS that needs no account other than a local account.

Windows 10 Home you cannot even create a local account without having the Internet disconnected.

You can setup iOS devices without an Apple ID if that is what you are trying to imply.

You can, but apart from calling & web browsing, it's not that useful, in contrast to a windows machine (i guess you probably can't use the windows store)

iOS is still useful without an iCloud account. Everything still works. Calendar, Calculator, Contacts, Safari, Music, etc, on and on all work just fine. You can add any number of third party services with the email app. All you loose not logging into iCloud is sync'ing of said data to other devices. It's a local only device at that point.

Pretty sure the same stands for Android.

What do you mean with third party services? Apps? You can download (free) apps w/o an Apple ID?

No. I mean you can use the included PIM/multimedia apps with any current service you use without using any Apple account. Just goto accounts and passwords under settings and add your preferred service to integrate with notes/email/contacts/etc.

Sure I would say this would make it more of a feature phone but the device itself is quite usable without an iCloud account.

The Windows Store (now called the Microsoft Store, apparently to match the name o their physical stores), does allow one yo download free programs without using a Microsoft Account. I'm guessing you might need one for paid programs, but I've literally never tried, since this is a PC, not a phone/tablet.

I'm not sure how you're having a hard time. Yes, Microsoft releases new OS versions. I'm not sure what you think that has to do with backwards compatibility. Have you not heard any of the stories about all the hacks Microsoft has had to implement over the past decades to ensure that third-party applications function correctly? A program made for Win95 will generally work seamlessly on W10. Worst-case scenario, you'll need to change compatibility settings or configure exceptions in things like exploit protection. The same can't be said for Linux, where the only thing you can count on is the kernel's ABI.

Windows is light years ahead in this department compared to any alternative. It's a hard problem.

Your chain breaks between Me and XP, because you omitted Win2K. And that's a huge change - It was the point at which they switched to the NT kernel from the previous DOS-based ones. While MS hasn't always done a great job on all of the OS functionality surrounding the kernel (though it's quite good now), the internals of the NT kernel are and always have always been excellent, and IMO, are considerably superior to Linux' kernel internals.

One reason for this, interestingly, is that NT had less of a past to deal with - it was a clean-sheet design by one of the most experienced OS kernel designers on the planet (David Cutler, from DEC) - Linux was still trying to be "Unix-like" and maintain (more or less) POSIX compatibility (though to be fair, POSIX didn't show up until about the time Linux grew out of its hobbyist toy phase...)

>I am having a really hard time seeing how one can infer from that timeline that Microsoft's desktop OS line follows a philosophy of "catering to the user, keeping things consistent, and being backwards compatible."

In the simple sense that you can run ancient Win 95 applications in any of these later versions (if not 3.11 and DOS too).

>> you can run ancient Win 95 applications in any of these later versions

In theory, according to MS. In reality we all have seen old applications die when windows updates. Security-related applications are notorious for this. What once worked perfectly well with Win8 now goes into total panic mode when it sees Win10 doing its thing in unexpected ways.

>In reality we all have seen old applications die when windows updates. Security-related applications are notorious for this.

I wouldn't expect "security related" applications to work (e.g. some antivirus), as they use bizarro / too low level APIs.

But you can still run 15+ year old games, office apps, and whatever...

Hardware support was always an issue on every version of windows but on the software side the only time I had software compatibility issue was whenI moved to Windows 2000. Windows vista for me was just a bad PR management by Microsoft.

I place the blame mainly on penny pinching OEMs who sold windows XP hardware and slapped vista capable logo on it.

> Windows would never sacrifice it's backwards compatibility.

They wouldn't necessarily need to sacrifice backwards compatibility. They would just have to ensure that the new OS fully supports all of their APIs from the past.

Imagine Wine but 10 times better, built into the OS natively, and built by 500 engineers with full-time pay. I'm sure it could be pulled off, if they wanted to.

But they probably don't want to.

What you're describing are the Windows compatibility mitigations patches. Windows 10 emulates a tremendous number of quirks and glitches from earlier versions of Windows. Fifteen years ago they were already knee-deep in patches ( http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplech... ), and the importance of backwards compatibility has not diminished since.

I wonder why they can't just take the Android approach and let each .exe define an API level that it wants to have, and then never change how that version of the API behaves, just release new versions and let apps update their code on their own schedule. I feel like they shouldn't be knee-deep in patches if they do that ... but I'm not familiar with Windows development at all.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/win7appqual/c...

They did add that. With the initial Windows 7 release. In 2009.

> Imagine Wine but 10 times better

I have a hard time doing that, Wine is already so good. I can certainly imagine better but even 2x better is kinda hard to picture.

It's pretty far IMO.

The decor and fonts look like Windows 95. Unicode characters don't display and show as boxes. Input methods don't work. Lots of hardware doesn't work. There's no obvious way to configure all the things you can usually configure in Windows. GPU accelerations don't work properly in things like Adobe's products.

It has come very far but only if you judge it by the fact that everyone is doing work for it for free.

> everyone is doing work for it for free.

Actually, there is a company called CodeWeavers[1], which sells software based on Wine. CodeWeavers's Wiki page says "The CrossOver version of Wine is regularly refreshed with the latest free Wine patches; likewise, patches from the company are sent back to the Wine project almost immediately. CodeWeavers is a major contributor to the Wine project ... hosts the project's website, and employs the project's maintainer, Alexandre Julliard, as their CTO."

Alexandre Julliard has his own Wikipedia page, also saying "He now works full-time on Wine for CodeWeavers."[2] If you look at Wine's changelogs like in https://www.winehq.org/announce/5.19 , you see his name on a bunch of commits. Piotr and Jacek Caban are names I also recognize as having been prominent contributors for years, and googling quickly shows they are CodeWeavers employees as well. So it seems true. I'm tempted to go buy CrossOver just to support their effort.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWeavers

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Julliard

> Imagine Wine but 10 times better, built into the OS natively, and built by 500 engineers with full-time pay.

That is basically what WSL1 is: WINE, but backwards.

The whole point of Project Reunion is to drop some of those ideas and get back on track with a Windows 7 like development stack, just with an improved runtime tooling (UWP).

And in about 10 years pretend that the road started by Sinosfky on Windows 8 never happened.

Oh the backwards compat attitude goes quite far. Even to the extent that shims are added in updates just to make sure old apps keep working in cases where the vendor can't realistically update all client machines.

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