renzev, 1 year ago

In the unix world, truly great programs tend to stay around for ever. less has been around since 1983. grep was there ten years earlier. Linux users love vim. What does the “v” stand for, you ask? “Visual”, of course, because it was one of the first text editors to offer support for computer monitors. And before that, when we had teletypes, people used ed, which still comes pre-installed with Ubuntu. Not to mention that the modern linux terminal is basically emulating (that’s why we called them terminal emulators) an electronic typewriter with some extra extensions for color and cursor support. They’re backwards compatible to this day. That’s why it says tty (teletype) when you press ctrl-alt-F2.

The caveat is that these examples are all low-level programs that have few dependencies. And they are extremely useful, therefore well-maintained. When it comes to more complex programs with a lot of dependencies, unless there is someone to keep it updated with the latest versions of those dependencies, it will eventually get broken.

The reason this happens less often in Wndows is because wndows historically hasn’t had a package manager, forcing devs to bundle all their dependencies into the executables. Another part of the reason is that mcrosft would lose a lot of business customers if they broke some obscure custom app with a new update, so they did their best to keep everything backwards compatible. Down to the point of forbidding you from creating a file named in order to keep support for programs written for qdos, an OS from before filesystems were invented.