I have lots of ten year old Android apps running on my Android 14 without too many issues.

In Wine/Windows I run Windows applications from the 90s. In Windows 11 64 you can install and use Office 97.

In Linux nothing even close is possible. People do care about old applications. They really do.

This is untrue. You can run old Linux binaries on modern Linux systems if you have the older libraries. You want to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to where the old libraries are located.

By the way, any Android applications using Google’s old messaging APIs no longer work and need to be rewritten to use fire base. I know people who were bitten by that multiple times since Google had to keep reinventing push notifications.

> This is untrue. You can run old Linux binaries on modern Linux systems if you have the older libraries.

Again, 0.01% of people in the world could do it, 0.0001% would do it.

That's all you need to know about Linux compatibility.

And don't get me started on LD_LIBRARY_PATH not working for glibc but you conveniently "forgot" about that.

Compatibility "exists" except when it doesn't and it's extremely hard to achieve even if you're a professional.

In other words it doesn't exist.

Use the other system’s elf interpreter (which is conveniently a library). Then it should work. Saying an ability to run older binaries does not exist is just wrong.

By the way, when someone makes an assertion that something is always true, it only takes 1 counter example to disprove it. The assertion that you cannot run old Linux binaries on a newer system has been disproven by a counter example.

> Saying an ability to run older binaries does not exist is just wrong.

For 99.99% of users this "ability" does not exist. End of story. Period.

I don't care about hacks on tops of tricks on top of hacks. People are not interested in this madness.

Every second comment in this discussion comes from a hardcore software developer who desperately tries to vindicate core Linux flaws by providing workarounds which would work only for people like you.

This is NOT how the world works. This is NOT what people care about or interested in. If cars, refrigerators, microwave ovens worked like that no one would buy them.

If it's Linux? Ah, totally fine.

I'm done with this exercise in futility.

Then you acknowledge your previous claims about the capability not existing were wrong. You also contradict yourself by saying elsewhere that mostly geeks run Linux, which implies far more than 99.99% of users can do this. It is not a hack either. It is the way you are supposed to run old software by design.

Can you stop making shit up?

I dare you to grab a Linux distro from the late 90s/earlier 00s and run any application that uses GTK1 or Qt1/2 on your Ubuntu 24.

Without spending insurmountable amounts of time. You will fail miserably. Your 0.0001% example is pure BS.

I run Gentoo, not Ubuntu. I have run graphical software from Ubuntu on my machine in a chroot that spoke to my X11 server in the past. I did it to get a Windows game running whose anticheat had wine support that was incompatible with newer versions of glibc than 2.32. A similar process should work with an old Linux distribution binary.

That said, you refuse to recognize that you are wrong no matter how much evidence is presented and even go so far as to present evidence debunking what you say while claiming it supports what you say. If I were to run a graphical application from the 90s on my machine, you would accuse me of making up the result. Since you will say the same thing even if I did this exercise, why should I bother?