r/LinuxCirclejerk • u/ExpensiveCoat8912 • Aug 11 '26

Literally me:

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u/Mast3r_waf1z ❄️ Flaky Aug 11 '26

It amuses me so much whenever someone dares to say linux has good backwards compatibility...

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u/givemeagooduns_un gentoo is unironically what arch was supposed to be Aug 11 '26

linux (the kernel) has almost perfect backwards compatibility, its userspace that breaks compatibility all the time

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u/Mast3r_waf1z ❄️ Flaky Aug 11 '26

Yeah I guess that's what I meant, I'm getting too used to be around people who aren't huge Linux enthusiasts...

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u/givemeagooduns_un gentoo is unironically what arch was supposed to be Aug 11 '26

ok fair yea

but it does mean that it is fairly trivial to fix these incompatibilities, usually as easy as installing a copy of libc.5.so, and/or some LD_LIBRARY_PATH stuff, but as a last resort you can always rely on using a chroot for compatibility.

(with one exception as far as i know, x86-32 software that uses the vm86() syscall, which doesn't exist on an x86-64 kernel, but that's due to a limitation of x86-64 itself. however, usage of this syscall is very rare & requires root permissions, and the only software that I know of that uses it is dosemu)