They Say A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

[kraftman]

I think we've got a misunderstanding here - by portabble apps, I meant something like this - apps you extract to a random directory in which the app is fully contained - settings, temporary files, pretty much everything. This allows you to use a USB flash drive as the app root and run the app on any windows PC you connect it to.

Sorry, my fault. This looks interesting.

With some tweaking, I believe one cat turn a tarball into a portable app, but the incompatibilities in some low-level libraries + binary incompatibilities between binaries created by different versions of gcc mean the stuff rarely works across multiple distros.

I consider some different distros as different OS'es Maybe it won't be a big problem on distros which follow LSB, but I'm not sure.

[V!NCENT]

I never unstoods why all these whiners never got together and said: Hey let's make a binary compatible API just like Wine and all use that. That way we only need to port the layer. Well people... you do not even need to make that freaking layer because it already exists: GNUstep: http://www.gnustep.org/

Why doesn't everybody stop whining if they do not really care? And why do people who do care that whine do not take any action?

[DoDoENT]

Can I run win98 or xp binaries in win7 natively?

Yes, you can.

I meant idiotic, because Windows uses swap while there's still enough memory left and things slow down.

Fedora does that too. I had to set vm.swappiness to 0 in order to avoid such behavior.