this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
1064 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
78511 readers
2767 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What are you talking about? Linux has virtually no backwards compatibility at all. Maybe one or two years max. The kernel is fine. The weak point is glibc.
You literally need to recompile applications constantly to stay compatible with glibc. Otherwise they just don’t work.
The good news is that distros are constantly providing freshly compiled versions of open source applications.
The bad news is that actual binary backwards compatibility is non existent. Try running a binary compiled in 2005 on modern Linux. You’ll just get a ton of glibc errors.
Windows lets you run applications compiled in 1995 on modern desktops.
Linux is great and it’s what I use. But we can’t claim backwards compatibility as a strength. Maybe a binary compiled today with musl might run in 2036 but musl targeting is quite rare.