Most of which have to be recompiled to support newer libraries when the older libraries aren't supported anymore. There's a reason why package managers have to deal with dependency issues.
The tools may be decades old, but change one function in one library among hundreds and you're most likely going to end up recompiling a lot of shit. It was kind of like a house of cards before flatpack. Being a distro maintainer must be a nightmare. You gotta tweak other people's software to play nice with your distro while not deviating too much and keeping up with upstream updates.
This has been a great boon to me. Whenever Apple upgrades Mac OS, I check my regional equivalent to craigslist for cheap music gear that stops working. Has worked twice for me. I got a really nice 24 channel audio interface for 20 bucks.
Not my experience. I've had multiple old games and an old printer that just straight up didn't work under Windows. On Linux however (using wine for the windows exe's) it usually does run. Sometimes it does require some googling, but there's usually someone who tried it before.
Games are actually the hardcore compatibility test. They are much less compatible than the average piece of software. That's due to them using much more of the hardware/low-level-APIs of the OS, but also due to DRM and Anti-Cheat-Software (where applicable).
And printers are also (for some reason) super difficult. Probably because they are cheap, planned-obsolescence pieses of crap hardware, which are chock-full of DRM.
The spooler spanning userland a d kernel address space was never going to go well, either.
To be fair, it went a lot worse than people thought, but that's probably because printers were cheap to produce and beancounters find programmers expensive
The last point is probably the biggest issue. Even if for some reason a prodigy embedded dev ended up working on super cheap HP printers, they wouldn't get the time and budget to actually push the drivers/software/firmware past a barely working state.
And if there is more budget to burn, it will be allocated to DRM measures like blocking 3rd party ink.
Win98 software also do not work reliably on modern Windows. Microsoft abandoned that kind of compatibility a while ago for a mix of both good and bad reasons.
You will have better odds of running it on ReactOS or Linux.
Maybe so, but all that spaghetti code to ensure the backwards compatibility comes at a cost of endless Windows jank.
I use both Windows and Mac machines for my audio work and while everything is consistently just 'plug and play' on my Mac, on the PC side I'm constantly fighting a losing battle with Windows ASIO audio driver issues, multi-monitor issues, Microsoft constantly asking me to make an account every 3 days...
For gaming, I love Windows. Still yet to find anything it does better and with less fuss than MacOS in a work environment though.
Windows is def better than Mac for backwards compatibility, but nah dude it's not even close to perfect. Ive had better luck using wine for old windows programs
I hear a lot about Windows backwards compatibilyty, but i don't think it has ever actualy worked for me. Every time i tried to install a program meant for anything older then win7/win10 i get some cryptic error and end up using a VM.
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