It depends on the distribution. For example Debian supports it since the very first releases which is for more than 20 years, for RedHat/CentOS it's only supported since a few years (since v7). Server upgrades usually do not cause any problems, for desktop systems it might get a bit rough when you have installed a lot of "foreign" packages.

I guess that is to be expected, interesting will be whether this will remain the case also to the future. I haven't really been following what MS has plans for the future (of Windows), maybe they haven't even decided themselves either (whether there will be Windows 11 at some point etc.; I'm under the impression that there are no such plans but what do I know). Sometimes they just release "alternative" versions of Windows 10 like 10S or 10X or whatever, and hope people will adopt them or migrate to them...

I recall from the past when I've done e.g. a fresh installation with the original Windows XP or Windows 7 installer, and then started upgrading it, there have been quite many steps when it goes from service pack to another. Whatever, they have still worked fine after the several update rounds, just took a damn long time. :)

Much like Windows, the arbitrary restrictions on GOG are numerous and baffling. Your image can't be bigger than 500 kb per, and you mustn't ever cross 2 MB in total size.
Functionally, yes. There are even versions of LInux that can can still fit on a floppy disk and those specially made to live in the Ram of a system but leave when you're done; aside from Live Sessions.

Most Linux follows the .dotfile style of configuration, (Plaintext configuration) the nearest thing to a "registry" is the damnable Dbus system that GNOME uses.
Hypothetically, the only thing that'll stop a thing from being compatible are Kernel and library file changes. Or missing library files. So for example I have a file manager that started development in 1998, and it probably hasn't changed a whole lot in the intervening years in terms of what libraries it is asking for. (It also looks like it was made in 1998.)

One of the bigger things I could think of for compatibility breakers are distros choosing different implimentations of key things like C libraries.

Well, basically it's a GUI for the firewall that has assignable permissions to programs, zones of trust and other such knickknacks. You can set settings either per session or permanently write them.

Speaking of library incompatibilities, it's not unknown for GOG's packaged libs to become a source of breakage themselves on more recent distro releases, as here: https://www.gog.com/forum/x_series/x3_terran_war_linux_shared_library_issues/post5

bluez also needs d-bus, which is part of my issue with bluetooth on linux, particularly non-desktop linux. (Maybe I want a Raspberry Pi Zero W to play audio via bluetooth, but I'd rather not have the complexity or space use (maybe I want to fit the entire OS in RAM? even run with the SD card being data-only (no OS)?).)


(Yes, there is a way to boot a Raspberry Pi Zero (W) without an SD card; look up "rpiboot" in your favorite search engine.)

Thankfully, I understand that there's an alternative in development, that much like Pipewire, aims to solve the many problems of the previous implementation.
This reminds me, wasn't OS X supposed to be the "last" MacOS version too?

so some of these installers dont even work on newly released linux ?:O

I would advise against moving completely to Linux. I think it would be best to have dual boot with one OS being Windows 10 and another OS being the Linux distro of your choice (it seems the most popular one is Ubuntu, btw).

Each OS has positive and negative points. Some I can remember are:

- Windows has more native programs (games included), and compability with Linux through Wine (or Valve's Proton) isn't perfect.
- You have far more control over the system files on Linux than on Windows.
- If you like using Github programs often, from my tests, it seems it's easier on Linux to build the ones that don't come ready to be used.
- If you find hard to use commands, using Windows tends to be easier, since it doesn't require the cmd or PowerShell as much as Linux requires the command terminal (the equivalent of the cmd).
- Starting programs seems to be faster on Ubuntu 20.04 (the distro I use), but not by much.

nice list

Im against dual boot, I just can't see why would you want to do that

If you want to play a game you restart pc and play on windows? then when you want to do anything else you restart again to boot up linux?
Sounds like a lot of hassle for minimal gain
and if you use both fully that is even worse , then you have to sync your stuff somehow, get and learn different apps if they are not available on both , just way too much extra work for what exactly?

So if you need apps that doesnt run on linux just win10 only.
If you dont have any of those app you could go for linux only.
yeah i tried out Mint years ago , and just went with clean install after it is way too complicated to do a manual update.

Guess who got suprised by Mint when they tried to upgrade it (on my father's laptop). It got stuck trying to upgrade things and kept looping at the same step instead of aborting and pulling back.

Yeah, if the damned process is still broken, that's some Never Forgive right there. There are competent ways to go about it, and I'd be damned if going up numbers in Fedora isn't some of the smoothest things you could do.

Though, WYGD when you're dealing with the tablescraps of Ubuntu's leftovers, I guess?
It's one of the reasons I absolutely loathe the LTS model.

Fun times while trying to fetch the latest definitions for Windows Defender. Thinking it's about time to manually check for updates (since Defender is lazy at times), I click the "Check for updates" button yet nothing comes back. OK, so they must've had an off day or something, therefore one can assume there are no AV updates for the time being. Alright, then what about updating the whole system, surely nothing new... Wrong, there's a definition update for Windows Defender. Hey now, wasn't that a job that should've been handled by Defender itself? Apparently not.

Also, for some reason or another, Windows Defender brings the CPU usage to 99% while scanning, every single time. I haven't seen that happen with any other security software on this hardware.
Somehow I think they're pulling the user's leg with this message: "Feel free to keep working while we scan your device."

Out of the box, Win10 uses no less than 1.3GB of RAM.
Compare this to something like Windows 8.1 which uses 6-700 MB after a cold boot and 3 times less processes.

I've been using Windows since the 90s and this is by far the worst experience, on so many levels. I don't see any improvement on the horizon, not at this pace.

Yeah I seem to remember something about NVIDIA graphics cards not getting along well with Linux. That might be a problem for me because I just bought a new EVGA RTX 3070 GPU.

Tested it myself with a GTX 1060 and I have to say it worked surprisingly well. Granted, there is room for improvement.