Windows 10 is a lot more than just a skin for Windows 7. Just like all the Linux packages dependencies, All the individual libraries for Windows update. How things work changes all the time when security vulnerabilities are found.
Yes, they’ll stop supporting older packages and kernels. No reason not to. In situations where it’s needed, like LTS distros, they get security fixes backported to them and that’s about it. Not really daily driver stuff.
A .deb relies on other packages, so a modern Firefox package will not be installable on an ancient OS. With Ubuntu Pro, Ubuntu 16.04 will still get updates until 2026, so I think you would get Firefox from Ubuntu until then. But there’s no chance you would get a modern Firefox for 7.10 or 8.04.
Maybe you should ask yourself why you would like to cling to an ancient version of Linux. You don’t like the new desktop or anything else that comes with the new version? Then you can install another desktop or another distribution.
Yeah. You can forget the .deb packages. They need dependencies and c libraries and stuff. After 2-5 years it becomes difficult and then impossible to install. You might be better off with some package format like flatpak. Or maybe better yet: the plain executable. probably with statically linked libraries. I think that should work for quite a while.
There are programs out there that come in a single executable file without requirements. they’re supposed to run from an usb stick and without installation. I think you should try those. they should be pretty self contained.
Other than that… I second the question. Why do you want something like an ancient operating system combined with a brand new browser? The OS will have hundreds of security issues. And in case someone does something like plug in a recent usb stick to save some files, it won’t recognize the format because exfat or something wasn’t yet invented in 2007.
I don’t use vscode so I can’t help too much beyond saying Distrobox is awesome and I’ve been using it for my headless dev machine for a few months and won’t go back to anything else.
Agreed. I would have like Ubuntu to come with flatpak, but snap exists for longer than flatpak and has additional use cases. Snap allows to do app packaging and even the rest of the system. Fedora uses rpm-ostree + flatpak instead.
Discontinue and drop support mean different things. Runtime requirements and APIs can change in any update, even if they appear the same to users. Dropping support can be read as “you can try to make it work, but we guarantee nothing”.
The degree of success you have in coercing the package to run anyways will depend on which APIs are required, and if you can install them in your system. Windows 7 and 10 look similar, but the windows kernel has changed quite a bit between them. If it needs system access it can get hard, where if it’s dotnet or Java you just need the right runtime
Snaps I get, but Ubuntu? Aside from an asinine application process to get hired a Canonical, they did a lot to push for a more straightforward Linux desktop experience. Their time has passed, but cancer is a bit too much for me, considering all the fantastic offshoots.
Context: I came to Ubuntu from Gentoo. Debian before that and a brief flirt with the hot fantastic mess that was Mandrake when I first discovered Linux.
Snaps is just the latest controversial tech they haved pushed for. They have a long history of pushing for things they have created that people don’t want or don’t want their implementation of (like upstart or the original unity desktop env). Or pushing for stuff before it is ready (like pulseaudio).
Nothing wrong with pushing for your own tech, but they do seem to miss the mark a lot on what they want to introduce. And keep upsetting the community over it.
There is a problem with pushing tech if that tech is proprietary — such as with Snaps.
Unity I don’t think was ever that controversial, except that Ubuntu was sending all desktop search queries to Amazon at one point, which was, of course, terrible privacy-wise. The reason why Unity died is because Ubuntu decided it’s not worth the money to maintain it.
There was a lot of community backlash when they first released unity as its own thing. Lots of people hated it because it was very different from what came before. That is what made it controversial.
i3 counts, right? I have always been a keyboard oriented user and a big part of what drove me from Windows is them breaking or changing the hotkeys I used regularly. To me it is the perfect “you have control, this is your device, it works and looks how you want.” wm
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