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Historically, Windows versions had excellent backwards compatibility, so at least in the past, this was much less of a problem in the Windows world than in the macOS world.

This is also the reason why so many Windows users are so angry that in particular since Windows 10 (but partly already in previous Windows versions) Microsoft made it so hard to have some "stable" Windows version on a computer that only gets security updates. Similarly for the forced Windows 11 upgrade where Windows 11 (officially) does not even work on many computers that Windows 10 supported.



Windows itself has a great backwards compatibility story - but the Internet doesn't, so the moment you have to communicate with the outside world, you need to deal with the high churn culture of modern software.


I can still run my old executables that I compiled back in 2002 and 2003 on my current Windows computers.

I don't think I could do that with anything that was compiled for Linux or MacOS back then.

I wouldn't want to do that with anything that opens ports on my computer that was compiled back then.




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