Not my experience. I’ve had multiple old games and an old printer that just straight up didn’t work under Windows. On Linux however (using wine for the windows exe’s) it usually does run. Sometimes it does require some googling, but there’s usually someone who tried it before.
Games are actually the hardcore compatibility test. They are much less compatible than the average piece of software. That’s due to them using much more of the hardware/low-level-APIs of the OS, but also due to DRM and Anti-Cheat-Software (where applicable).
And printers are also (for some reason) super difficult. Probably because they are cheap, planned-obsolescence pieses of crap hardware, which are chock-full of DRM.
The spooler spanning userland a d kernel address space was never going to go well, either.
To be fair, it went a lot worse than people thought, but that’s probably because printers were cheap to produce and beancounters find programmers expensive
The last point is probably the biggest issue. Even if for some reason a prodigy embedded dev ended up working on super cheap HP printers, they wouldn’t get the time and budget to actually push the drivers/software/firmware past a barely working state.
And if there is more budget to burn, it will be allocated to DRM measures like blocking 3rd party ink.
Not my experience. I’ve had multiple old games and an old printer that just straight up didn’t work under Windows. On Linux however (using wine for the windows exe’s) it usually does run. Sometimes it does require some googling, but there’s usually someone who tried it before.
Games are actually the hardcore compatibility test. They are much less compatible than the average piece of software. That’s due to them using much more of the hardware/low-level-APIs of the OS, but also due to DRM and Anti-Cheat-Software (where applicable).
And printers are also (for some reason) super difficult. Probably because they are cheap, planned-obsolescence pieses of crap hardware, which are chock-full of DRM.
The spooler spanning userland a d kernel address space was never going to go well, either.
To be fair, it went a lot worse than people thought, but that’s probably because printers were cheap to produce and beancounters find programmers expensive
The last point is probably the biggest issue. Even if for some reason a prodigy embedded dev ended up working on super cheap HP printers, they wouldn’t get the time and budget to actually push the drivers/software/firmware past a barely working state.
And if there is more budget to burn, it will be allocated to DRM measures like blocking 3rd party ink.
Shouldn’t window’s compatibility mode solve most of those?
Should, yes, but I find it often doesn’t.
Yeah, it’s a real hit and miss affair, that thing…