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From: Borax Man <rotflol2@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Centos stream of batpiss
Date: Sat, 1 Jun 2024 12:44:38 -0000 (UTC)
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On 2024-06-01, 26xh.0717 <26xh.0718@e6t4y.net> wrote:
> On 4/22/24 8:16 AM, John McCue wrote:
>> Mich <mich@none.edu> wrote:
>>> I dug out an old workstation with Centos 8 stream. (...snip)
>>> It is more or less going to remove KDE Plasma if I say y.
>> 
>> Not a big surprise to me :(
>> 
>> When I had a RHEL Workstation, when I upgraded from 7 to 8
>> (or 8-9?), KDE was broken during that upgrade and Fluxbox
>> started to have issues too.
>> 
>> Seems RHEL wants you to use GNOME or nothing.  On Fluxbox
>> some applications and almost all proprietary applications I
>> had to use at work would fail unless you are running GNOME 3.
>> Same with KDE, but pieces of KDE would also fail.
>> 
>> At the time, I did a search and seems Red Hat is doing all
>> it can to prevent the use of KDE on RHEL.  Maybe that
>> philosophy moved to CentOS.
>> 
>> Sad to say, may be time to move to another distro.
>
>    Look, it's not JUST RHEL/Centos/Etc (though now you
>    are kinda being a beta-tester for IBM by using
>    Centos).
>
>    One of the biggest issues with Linux is the "dependencies
>    problem". Everything is writ to use THE existing versions
>    of libs and such and you can't update one thing without
>    parallel updates on everything downstream, and downstream
>    from them and ....
>
>    As the OS and selection of apps got much bigger, this
>    problem became much bigger. It's almost in an 'exponential'
>    phase now. SOMEWHERE you're gonna run into a missing
>    dependency.
>
>    For all its crappiness, DOS/Winders is MUCH better in
>    this respect. Hell, I've got an old Core-2-Quad board
>    that will still run 8/16 DOS apps from the Ancient Days.
>    Anybody remember ".COM" files ?  :-)
>
>    Library writers are expected to maintain backwards
>    compatibility, so it doesn't matter if your app is 2024
>    and yer libs are 1994. So long as they exist, things
>    generally work pretty well. This has changed a bit
>    for Win 11/12 ... dem bastards ... but still most of
>    yer older apps will still run fine.
>
>    Linux needs a new paradigm, kind of like with Win.
>    Alas I think Linux is too set-in-stone and this
>    will never happen. We will have to wait for some
>    whole new OS.
>
>    As for RHEL/etc and Gnome ... it's a HORRIBLE
>    GUI ! Don't know WHY they're so stuck on it.

I will say this is one thing that I do think Microsoft have done very
well, backwards binary compatibility.  It has come at a cost, the OS
has to have cruft to support these old programs, but binary backward
compatibility IS important.  Linux doesn't fare as well, mostly
because the libraries break.  But then again, DOS programs are self
contained, they are statically linked and always contain the library
code within the application, whereas with Unix, theyve used system
libraries from the start, and this makes backwards compatibility more complex.

I have been able to keep the same Linux binaries running for years and
years, as long as they are just linked against glibc.  Those
statically linked, or pure assembler have no issues continuing to run.

I guess its swings and roundabouts as they say, how often do you NEED
to run, natively, a really old binary?  Today, I run old .COM files in
DosBox, which gives me a better chance than Windows or even FreeDOS if
that .COM needs EGA or CGA graphics.  DosBox runs fine on Linux.