Linux has no backwards compatibility, unlike Windows. If you want to work with 25+ year old software, Windows is the way to go.
Jason Peterson
Expect userland breakage. Linus generally tries to avoid it but there's definitely been some changes in the past 15 years that won't work well with a 15 year old userland. Do try it and see what happens.
Hudson Lee
but what if its 10+ year old Linux software with no Windows versions?
Christian White
It depends if the subset of necessary functionality to run their specific old hardware is still in the kernel. You can generally run Linux on old hardware without an issue.
Joshua White
yeah usually even new Linux kernel work allright in old hardware but things like 486 are no longer supported, pentiums are minimum
but however what is more rare thing would be to put a recent kernel into a very old linux distro runnin on top of old hardware and the effect of new kernel cannot be predicted
Adam Collins
You could land an F-15 on that forehead haha
Jose Reyes
This is incorrect, linux runs old software much better than windows does.
Hunter Ross
Because you can recompile it. The old binaries won't work.
William Long
Possible, I think. Maybe there would be some trouble on sysfs/udev-devtmpfs wise.
David Cook
big forehead = big brain
William Cook
> Will it be possible to use a new kernel on 15 year old Linux distro? Yes. See: LXC and CentOS 5 template, available at least in Proxmox. It's a bizzare feel to do uname -a and see something like "4.15", but it works.
Jason Nelson
linux makes no effort to support old kernel modules, but it absolutely does support old userland binaries
pic related, in a similar thread, i found and ran a nearly 15 year old ut2004 demo for linux, it required only an older version of libstdc++ and also the use of padsp for sound, that's all.
there's also no reason why you can't run old distros with new kernels, though i haven't played with this personally
Not a thinly veiled cun cun thread? I am disappoint.
Wyatt Taylor
i'm playing around with putting a modern 5.2.9 64bit kernel in a debian 3.0 (2002) rootfs, which originally has linux 2.2 it's not exactly drop-in, immediately it complains it can't fsck /dev/hda1 .. yea, this is before everything switched over to using /dev/sd* instead of course binaries will /run/, but that's not the only thing that is required
Liam Reyes
well, it does boot up just changing fstab to say "/dev/sda1" instead
yes, these are positively ancient /binaries/, not recompiled, running directly on my 5.2.9 host $ ls -lah /usr/bin/gimp-1.2 /usr/bin/mozilla-1.0.0 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2.2M Apr 10 2002 /usr/bin/gimp-1.2 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5.7k Jun 24 2002 /usr/bin/mozilla-1.0.0
Jordan Barnes
nearly none of the default mozilla bookmarks work anymore most of them either; - give a certificate error - can't negotiate a common encryption algorithm (https) - don't exist anymore and half the ones that still work are websites which aren't actively updated anymore
you can't even run software from distros two years apart without trouble shooting.
Linux is the ultimate botnet, repo slavery is designed update the bot net feature and it's not like anyone takes time to read the source code.
Ryan Garcia
how the fuck are you doing that? sorcery?
Jackson Allen
If you configured the kernel right, then probably. Linux has a policy of not breaking userspace.
Joseph Turner
ut2004 is just run directly, no chroot or anything the other two are being run from a chroot of debian 3.0, it's not that hard to run graphical programs from a chroot linux has excellent compatibility with userspace binaries, to the point you can even boot an entire distro using a much newer kernel ()