Windows 10 To Be A Free Upgrade: What Linux Users Need To Know

[Michael_S]

The situation would be vastly improved had linux taken the BSD model of development as developers would then be the maintainers for their packages in a Linux ports tree but that's never going to happen now.

My understanding is that for some of the popular 'core' distributions, especially Debian and Fedora, often the application developer is also a distribution developer. That's not the same as portage, but at least the person who best understands the application is also the one to package it.

Without drastically changing the way the packaging model works the benefits you ascribe really only work for closed source software. There are plenty of other benefits though as I said to going the JVM/.NET route besides that though. A purely JVM/.NET web browser for example wouldn't take like 6 hours to compile and the fact that it's already running in a VM I would imagine would only help in implementing it.

Good points, here and throughout. Thanks for the discussion.

[curaga]

But if you package your software in a JVM-compatible .jar file or whatever the equivalent is for .NET, there's nothing to maintain. I can use a fifteen year old .jar file unmodified right now.

Anecdote incoming...

I have both old Java software that doesn't run on current Java (written pre-Java 2, Sun deprecated something it uses), and a Java applet I wrote three years ago quit working two years ago, a mere year after writing it (it runs, but accepts no input in any browser. No idea what they broke in the Java plugin).

So in practice, they have to use and be fully contained in a small subset even when using a VM runtime. The magic hammer is yet to be invented.

[Michael_S]

Anecdote incoming...

I have both old Java software that doesn't run on current Java (written pre-Java 2, Sun deprecated something it uses), and a Java applet I wrote three years ago quit working two years ago, a mere year after writing it (it runs, but accepts no input in any browser. No idea what they broke in the Java plugin).

So in practice, they have to use and be fully contained in a small subset even when using a VM runtime. The magic hammer is yet to be invented.

Interesting. I work on the web server side, and we have a lot of Java libraries written and compiled with Java 1.3 and 1.4 (aka Java 3 and 4 because of the funky naming snafu) humming along in production on Java 7 runtimes. But browser applets are another can of beans - our lone Java Web Start application for customers (to help people with printing, if it matters) needed to be revised for Windows Vista because of the security improvements, then again with Windows 7. And I wouldn't be surprised if it needed changes again after they started supporting Windows 8, but it was after I left.

[gamerk2]

@Michael_S

The only way to run 16 bit Windows games now on Win 64 bit is DOSBOX with integrated Windows 3.1. But for that I don't need Win 64 bit

Technically, you can run 16-bit DOS titles. Windows .exe's are not supported by DOSBOX. But since most titles from that era happened to have both DOS and Windows runtimes, this is usually moot.

The reason 16-bit exe's no longer run is MSFT stopped supporting the WOW16 layer, which essentially was a 16-to-32 bit wrapper. Makes sense, as they'd have to do the process twice to get those titles running on x64, and who knows what putting a wrapper around a wrapper would uncover, bug wise. It also allows them to officially drop support for the old cooperative threading model that 3.1 and previous used. Worst case: XP mode is still a thing, and most VMs can run Win98 SE without any problems, making this largely moot.

Aside from that, most Win32 titles run without issues, although a few GLIDE dependent titles may need a GLIDE wrapper to run (and I've noticed those tend to be a little on the unstable side).

[smitty3268]

But if you package your software in a JVM-compatible .jar file or whatever the equivalent is for .NET, there's nothing to maintain.

Try to get code contributions to a project written in .NET 1.0, or Java 2. It won't happen.

Well, you might get some, but they're going to be contributions that update it to use later versions of the frameworks/languages.

If it's open-source, that stuff is going to get updated anyway - or else the project is just entirely dead, in which case it's not really an open-source project regardless of how it's technically licensed.

From a proprietary standpoint, write-once and run anywhere is something Java/Net have been pushing for a long, long, time, and it does make a lot of sense. You can also get a lot of the same benefits by just statically linking everything if you are using c/c++.

[Luke_Wolf]

most VMs can run Win98 SE without any problems, making this largely moot.

Which ones would those be? Because Virtualbox and VMware have got some serious issues with it, and it's difficult to get it to actually get it to run let alone do something like actually play games in it.