If every OS was open source, you could run vista
The article discusses the challenges of running Microsoft Windows Vista as an open-source operating system. It highlights the issues related to software compatibility and security vulnerabilities that Vista faced over the years. The author reflects on the historical context of Vista's performance and the implications of modifying it to support modern applications.
- ▪Windows Vista was released in 2006 and had a poor reputation due to frequent driver-related crashes.
- ▪Running Vista today would be problematic due to the need for additional software components from newer Windows versions.
- ▪Vista had significant security vulnerabilities, including those exposed by leaked NSA tools in 2017.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I presume OP is referring to Microsoft Windows Vista, released at the end of the year 2006.It had a poor reputation. My vague recollection is that I experienced an irritating number of driver-related BSODs. To me, it now feels like a standard Microsoft experience of them pushing out a new OS then fixing it with service packs over a few years.To answer OPs hypothetical thought-experiment:In my view, running Windows Vista today would firstly have the problem that Microsoft has added lots of extra stuff (OS APIs, runtime libraries etc) and you would find that quite a lot of software won't work without stuff in newer versions of Windows.I feel that if someone added enough extra stuff to Vista to run current software to Vista that it could run most current software then it would not really be…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.