Yeah, cause the Win32 API + DirectX is more stable than the rest of Linux.

There’s a reason why Steam games prefer to emulate Win32 API on Linux, rather than compiling to Linux binary native. Wine is more stable than almost everything else, and Windows’s behavior (both documented, and undocumented) has legendary-levels of compatibility.

You know that doesn’t matter when commercial software often only releases and tests their software on Ubuntu and RedHat, right?

I run Ubuntu / Red Hat / etc. etc. because I’m forced to. Do you think I’m creating a lab with a billion different versions of Linux for fun?

Linux kinda-sorta works if you’ve got the freedom to “./configure && make && make install”, recreating binaries and recompiling often. Many pieces of software are designed to work across library changes (but have the compiler/linker fix up minor issues).

But once you start having proprietary binaries moving around (and you’ll be facing proprietary binaries cause no office will give you their source code), you start having version-specific issues. The Linux-community just doesn’t care very much about binary-compatibility, and they’ll never care about it because they’re anti-corporate and don’t want to offer good support to binary code like this. (And prefers to force GPL down your throats).

There’s certainly some advantages and disadvantages to Linux’s choice here (or really, Ubuntu / Red Hat / etc. etc. since each different distro really is its own OS). But in the corporate office world, Linux is a very poor performer in practice.

like saying you are running last night’s upload

If only. I’m running old stuff, not by choice either.

Ubuntu 18.04 and up literally fails to install on one of my work computers. I’ve been forced to run Ubuntu 16.04. BIOS-incompatibility / hardware issues happen man. It forces me to an older version. On some Dell workstations I’ve bought for my org, Ubuntu 22 fails to install and we’re forced to run Ubuntu 20.04 on those.

Software compiled on Ubuntu 16.04 has issues running on Ubuntu 20.04, meaning these two separate computers have different sets of bugs as our developers run and test.

I’m running old LTS Ubuntu instances, not because I want to mind you. But because I’ve been forced with hardware incompatibility bugs to do so. At least we have Docker, so the guy running Ubuntu 20.04 can install docker and create an Ubuntu 16.04 docker to run the 16.04 binaries. But its not as seemless as any Linux guy thinks.

CentOS is too stable and a lot of proprietary code is designed for Ubuntu instead. So while CentOS is stable, you get subtle bugs when you try to force Ubuntu binaries onto it. If your group uses CentOS / RedHat, that’s great. Except its not the most popular system, so you end up having to find Ubuntu boxes somewhere to run things effectively.

There’s plenty of Linux software these days that forces me (and users around me) to use Linux in an office environment. But if you’re running multiple Linux boxes (This box is Ubuntu, that one is Ubuntu 16 and can’t upgrade, that other box is Red Hat for the .yum packages…), running an additional Windows box ain’t a bad idea anyway. You already were like 4 or 5 computers to have this user get their job done.

Once you start dealing with these issues, you really begin to appreciate Windows’s like 30+ years of binary compatibility.