> That didn't prevent OS X, from a near bankrupt company in 1998-99 with ~2% of PCs in the US, to get to ~10-15% in the same timespan. And that while still introducing a whole new OS in 2000, and changing CPU architecture in 2005.
Oh my friend you're under-selling Apple.
Apple, the most profitable company in the world, didn't get more than 10-15% of the market share. They didn't break any API's either. And they created their own hardware.
> It's not even close. MS still supports running even Win95 apps to this day, whatever they used an "abandoned API", so that's a moot point though. Old VB apps still run fine, etc.
Linux supports that too. You can still have a KDE1 app running on your Desktop.
Nobody has the incentive to do that. But it's pretty doable technically. Just like it's possible to run a Visual Basic app on Windows.
> Linux supports that too. You can still have a KDE1 app running on your Desktop.
It is not the same, under Windows 10 you can run a Win95 app as-is since the OS comes with the necessary APIs and these APIs still get updates.
Under Linux not only nobody has the KDE1 libraries installed, but also not any distribution provides them, they rely on other libraries that are incompatible, are a pain to build and unlike Win32 and similar APIs, KDE1 libraries have never seen any new improvements over the years. As an example for the latter, Win32 applications written for Windows 95 can use the extra text editor control functionality introduced after XP despite this functionality not even existing when they were made.
To provide something equivalent, the Linux desktop needs GUI API that will remain backwards compatible in the future (as nothing can be done about the past anyway) while at the same time getting improvements that apply to both new and existing programs.
Oh my friend you're under-selling Apple.
Apple, the most profitable company in the world, didn't get more than 10-15% of the market share. They didn't break any API's either. And they created their own hardware.
> It's not even close. MS still supports running even Win95 apps to this day, whatever they used an "abandoned API", so that's a moot point though. Old VB apps still run fine, etc.
Linux supports that too. You can still have a KDE1 app running on your Desktop.
Nobody has the incentive to do that. But it's pretty doable technically. Just like it's possible to run a Visual Basic app on Windows.