this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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Linux has excellent legacy support for Linux.
Now run a 1998 obscure Windows vendor custom app. The vendor went out of business 30 years ago.
Not to mention that it would kill the entirety of existing IT automation, the entirety of centralised system management, and lots more.
Actually, Linux has better support for legacy Windows apps (through wine) than for legacy Linux apps.
Your best bet to run it probably is on Linux with Wine. Or if it is MS themselves , they already have their own Win32 to Linux translation layers, for example DB2 for Linux runs that way.
Or you can just not introduce extra instability layers and use native Windows. I can't even fathom the cost of implementation and maintenance of something like that in a company like HCL (200 000 employees, last I checked).
Haha, are you aware of how many layers of Windows are just backward compatibility hacks? Architecturally Windows has changed a lot since Win98.
The fact that your 30year old business software is still running is just the fact that Windows has built in patches for some common programming patterns used at the time and someone having insight enough can enable/disable them (mostly).
Btw, the same for games. Windows detects specific games and re-enables former direct x bugs.
There are numerous layers of abstraction between your Win32 application and the Kernel, there's no reason they won't work on another kernel.
Oh. And of course it's badly debuggable and frequently goes wrong.
I stopped maintaining Windows systems and focused on developing software - it's so effing annoying that things always break out of the blue with a new windows patch versions because MS has bad quality control on their overcomplicated house of cards that is named Windows.
... which is exactly my point. What's yours?
Not so frequently to cause major disruptions.
Much too frequently, if you need to manage systems for a company.
THAT is my point.
I have spent too many nights unrolling and blocking Windows updates just to keep the fucking MS Exchange server happy. Or the damned 8 year old CRM software which writes to places that Windows now blocks access to.
Yeah it was paid time, but I'm much more happy if the systems I care about just run without hiccups.
So ultimately I just jailed all the Windows stuff in VMs which I can snapshot and reliably backup, which I can roll back (mostly, as long as it does not involve Active Directory) etc. Windows is inherently unstable, that's my point.
The ultimate solution was to get out of that job. Yeah, I stilm do use Windows as a daily driver, but single use only, no centralized management and thats kind of OK.
No such thing exists, especially with legacy corpo software.
As a Windows admin for the past ~20 years - nonsense.