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elmo2youHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

While Wine may indeed be quite stable and a good solution for running legacy Windows software

… While Wine may indeed be quite stable and a good solution for running legacy Windows software. I think that any dynamically linked legacy software can cause issues, both on Windows and Linux. Kernel changes may be a problem too. While Windows is often claimed to be backwards compatible, in practice your mileage may vary. Apparently, as my client found out the hard/expensive way.

Original discussionConvert Linux to Windows452 source comments · at import
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feelameeHN

> I can pull down a 20 year old exe and still run it today on Windows. Try doing the same with a Linux binary that's just a year old. There's no guarantee that it will be able to run based off some update that has happened IMHO, you just compare two different things. Traditional method of installing apps on Windows is packing all dynamic dependencies with it. While on linux dynamic dependencies are shared between apps. So, there is nothing surprising that when you change the dependencies of the app, it stops working. There are few ways to solve this and your are free to choose: - distribute the same as on Windows - link statically

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csdvrxHN

> I was involved in replacing Windows systems with Linux + Wine, because (mission-critical industrial) legacy software stopped working. No amount of tweaking could get it to work on modern Windows system. With Wine without a hitch, once all the required DLL files were tracked down. I moved from Windows 11 to Linux for the same reason: I was using an old version of Office because it was faster than the included apps: the full Word started faster than Wordpad (it was even on par with Notepad!) The Outlook from an old Office used less ram and was more responsive than the one included with Windows! When I got a new laptop, I had problems with the installation of each the old versions of Office I had around, and there were rumors old versions Office would be blocked. I didn't want to take the risk, so I started my migration. > While Windows is often claimed to be backwards compatible, in prac…

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GormoHN

Well, there's always LD_PRELOAD and LD_LIBRARY_PATH on Linux. My experience has been that most of the time when older binaries fail to run, it's because they are linked against old versions of libraries, and when I obtain those library versions -- exactly the same as obtaining the DLLs for the Windows executable -- things usually work just fine.

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