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Comment by elmo2you | Hacker News Reader

Aside from comparing two different things, as you correctly identify, I believe that even the author's original assertion just isn't true. Maybe for some exe files, but I doubt for all or even most.

I was involved in replacing Windows systems with Linux + Wine, because (mission-critical industrial) legacy software stopped working. No amount of tweaking could get it to work on modern Windows system. With Wine without a hitch, once all the required DLL files were tracked down.

While Wine may indeed be quite stable and a good solution for running legacy Windows software. I think that any dynamically linked legacy software can cause issues, both on Windows and Linux. Kernel changes may be a problem too. While Windows is often claimed to be backwards compatible, in practice your mileage may vary. Apparently, as my client found out the hard/expensive way.

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> I was involved in replacing Windows systems with Linux + Wine, because (mission-critical industrial) legacy software stopped working. No amount of tweaking could get it to work on modern Windows system. With Wine without a hitch, once all the required DLL files were tracked down.

I moved from Windows 11 to Linux for the same reason: I was using an old version of Office because it was faster than the included apps: the full Word started faster than Wordpad (it was even on par with Notepad!) The Outlook from an old Office used less ram and was more responsive than the one included with Windows!

When I got a new laptop, I had problems with the installation of each the old versions of Office I had around, and there were rumors old versions Office would be blocked.

I didn't want to take the risk, so I started my migration.

> While Windows is often claimed to be backwards compatible, in practice your mileage may vary

It was perfectly backwards compatible: Windows was working fine with very old versions of everything until some versions of Windows 11 started playing tricks (even with a Pro license)

I really loved Windows (and AutoHotKey and many other things), but now I'm happy with Linux.

> I really loved Windows (and AutoHotKey and many other things)

oh, do you know - how can I configure e.g. Win+1, Win+2, etc to switch to related virtual desktops? And - how to disable this slow animation.. just switch instantly?

May be you have several ideas where I should search. I'm use Linux as my OS for a long time, but now I need to use Windows at my job. So, I'm trying to bring my Windows usage experience as close as possible to so familiar and common on Linux.

You can disable all system animations at

Settings > Accessibility > Visual effects > Animation effects

There's no built-in way to set hotkeys to switch to a specific desktop. And my primary annoyance is that there's no way to set hotkeys to move a given window to a different desktop.

> So, I'm trying to bring my Windows usage experience as close as possible to so familiar and common on Linux.

I see you were given an answer for the slow animation. For most UI tweaks, regedit is a good starting point.

You may also like the powertoys, but I suggest you take the time to create AHK scripts, for example if you want to make your workflow keyboard centric

> So, I'm trying to bring my Windows usage experience as close as possible to so familiar and common on Linux.

I did the opposite with the help of hyprland on arch, but it took me years to get close to how efficient I was on Windows, where there are many very polished tools to do absolutely anything you can think of.

Well, there's always LD_PRELOAD and LD_LIBRARY_PATH on Linux. My experience has been that most of the time when older binaries fail to run, it's because they are linked against old versions of libraries, and when I obtain those library versions -- exactly the same as obtaining the DLLs for the Windows executable -- things usually work just fine.

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