Comment by jle17
3 years ago
> Think e.g. one of Loki games like SimCity. The audio will not work (and this will be a kernel ABI problem...). The graphics will not work. There will be no desktop integration whatsoever.
I have it running on an up to date system. There is definitely an issue that it's a pain to get working, especially for people not familiar with the cli or ldd and such, as it wants a few things that are not here by default. But once you get it the few libs it needs and ossp to emulate the missing oss in the kernel, there is no issue with gameplay, graphics or audio aside from the intro video that doesn't run.
So I guess the issue is that the compatibility is not user friendly ? Not sure how that should be fixed though. Even if Loki had shipped all the needed lib with the program, it would still be an issue not to have sound due to distro making the choice of not building oss anymore.
It would seem from your example that the issue is a lack of overall commitment to compatibility. There are Windows games from 1990s that still run fine w/sound - which is not surprising, given that every old Win32 API related to sound is still there, emulated as needed on top of the newer APIs. It sounds like Linux distros could do this here as well, since emulation is already implemented - they just choose to not have it set up out of the box.
> So I guess the issue is that the compatibility is not user friendly ?
I don't understand this point -- this is like claiming Linux has perfect ABI compatibility because at the end of the day you can run your software under a VM or a container. Of course everything has perfect compatibility if you go out of your way using old installations or emulation layers -- people under Windows actually install the Wine DX9 libraries since they have better compatibility than the native MS ones. But this means nilch for Windows' ABI compatibility record (or lack thereof).