<story><title>World of Goo Update, 10 Years Later</title><url>https://tomorrowcorporation.com/posts/world-of-goo-update-10-years-later</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skrebbel</author><text>Doesn&amp;#x27;t that mean Linux is entirely broken? Isn&amp;#x27;t the whole point of OSes that things that used to work, keep working?&lt;p&gt;I mean, lots of things are wrong with Windows but I can double-click a .exe from 1998 and in most cases it&amp;#x27;ll just run. I&amp;#x27;d assume Linux, being used a lot for servers and long-running apps, would have this too?</text></item><item><author>skummetmaelk</author><text>This is actually super impressive. Managing to create an application bundle which doesn&amp;#x27;t break down every now and then with new system updates is super challenging. 10 years is just wild.&lt;p&gt;Unless you only have libc as a dependency but I doubt that for a graphical application.</text></item><item><author>kgwxd</author><text>Holy cow, I bought the game 10 years ago, found my old email with the &amp;quot;Secret World of Goo Download Location&amp;quot; and it worked :) No Linux update yet, but I&amp;#x27;m going to play the original anyway. Such a fun game.&lt;p&gt;Edit: .deb package didn&amp;#x27;t work on Xubuntu 19.04 but extracting the .tar.gz and running .&amp;#x2F;WorldOfGoo.bin64 worked like a charm</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pantalaimon</author><text>Linux itself has this and is very strict about not breaking old userspace.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the userspace libraries that likes to drop compatibility with old binaries left and right and with most distributions it&amp;#x27;s not possible to install old versions of libraries.&lt;p&gt;Containers like Flatpack and Snap promise to solve this by just bundling the application with all the libraries it needs, frozen in time.
The Kernel then can handle it.</text></comment>
<story><title>World of Goo Update, 10 Years Later</title><url>https://tomorrowcorporation.com/posts/world-of-goo-update-10-years-later</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skrebbel</author><text>Doesn&amp;#x27;t that mean Linux is entirely broken? Isn&amp;#x27;t the whole point of OSes that things that used to work, keep working?&lt;p&gt;I mean, lots of things are wrong with Windows but I can double-click a .exe from 1998 and in most cases it&amp;#x27;ll just run. I&amp;#x27;d assume Linux, being used a lot for servers and long-running apps, would have this too?</text></item><item><author>skummetmaelk</author><text>This is actually super impressive. Managing to create an application bundle which doesn&amp;#x27;t break down every now and then with new system updates is super challenging. 10 years is just wild.&lt;p&gt;Unless you only have libc as a dependency but I doubt that for a graphical application.</text></item><item><author>kgwxd</author><text>Holy cow, I bought the game 10 years ago, found my old email with the &amp;quot;Secret World of Goo Download Location&amp;quot; and it worked :) No Linux update yet, but I&amp;#x27;m going to play the original anyway. Such a fun game.&lt;p&gt;Edit: .deb package didn&amp;#x27;t work on Xubuntu 19.04 but extracting the .tar.gz and running .&amp;#x2F;WorldOfGoo.bin64 worked like a charm</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>josteink</author><text>&amp;gt; Doesn&amp;#x27;t that mean Linux is entirely broken? Isn&amp;#x27;t the whole point of OSes that things that used to work, keep working?&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Broken&amp;quot; is a strong word. &amp;quot;Different&amp;quot; might be more fitting.&lt;p&gt;While I don&amp;#x27;t think anyone in the world of Linux and Linux-distros work with the explicit &lt;i&gt;aim&lt;/i&gt; of breaking compatibility, you have to realize that Linux and most Linux-distros are built entirely around open-source software.&lt;p&gt;Most users install software via a distro-provided package-manager which fetches binaries from a repo. These binaries have been built from source, by the distro-vendor, specifically for that distro.&lt;p&gt;That means Linux compatibility traditionally has been more about &lt;i&gt;source-level and compile-time compatibility&lt;/i&gt; more so than 100% uncompromised binary compatibility. If a change breaks binary compatibility, but the distro&amp;#x2F;system as a whole still builds fine, that&amp;#x27;s still compatible in most day-to-day scenarios of a common Linux end-user.&lt;p&gt;And unconstrained by having to maintain strict binary compatibility, it also allows developers to clean up historical garbage and technical debt they otherwise couldn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;This approach obviously has both drawbacks and advantages, but calling it &amp;quot;broken&amp;quot; seems unfair, overly opinionated and  really just wrong.</text></comment>