OS version survey

[stgatilov]

We are planning some update of build environment, but it comes with dropping support for old versions of OS-es.
It would be great to know many people use these old versions.

Sorry for the not-very-obvious versioning for Linux.
It seems that glibc version is the only thing that's important for binary compatibility.

[nbohr1more]

ldd --version

ldd (Ubuntu GLIBC 2.39-0ubuntu8.7) 2.39
Copyright (C) 2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Written by Roland McGrath and Ulrich Drepper.

[I.C.H.I.]

Even though I use the latest Windows but if you drop the older OS support it will cut off the people who may play TDM on a very old hardware which doesn't support the newer Windows. TBH this game is not in a position of neglecting their user base like that because I don't see the popularity ever growing. Literally nobody talks about The Dark Mod outside of this forum, even streamers almost never play it unlike games in Thief series.

Another reason why I don't see the necessity in this is because TDM doesn't use DirectX 12, so what is the point of doing that?

[MayheM]

Damn, i am the only one on windows 7 here. But it's ok if you guys are going to drop support. Maybe I'll upgrade soon.

[SeriousToni]

2 hours ago, MayheM said:

Damn, i am the only one on windows 7 here. But it's ok if you guys are going to drop support. Maybe I'll upgrade soon.

It works just fine on Linux BTW. Installed Linux for the first time in my life this year. Just as a hint if you don't want to upgrade Windows.  

[MayheM]

25 minutes ago, SeriousToni said:

It works just fine on Linux BTW. Installed Linux for the first time in my life this year. Just as a hint if you don't want to upgrade Windows.  

I used Linux before in the past. The only reason I am on 7 is because I am stuck on it. My monitor died some time ago and I am using my TV as one which doesn't support showing the boot screen.

[datiswous]

8 hours ago, nbohr1more said:

ldd --version

Ok I'll check it later. It's probably a new(er) version.

[chakkman]

5 hours ago, SeriousToni said:

It works just fine on Linux BTW. Installed Linux for the first time in my life this year. Just as a hint if you don't want to upgrade Windows.  

I installed Linux recently on a decommissioned laptop, after a long time of not using it. Pure joy: Wifi didn't work, so I immediately had to hack on the console, and activate an "unfree" repository. Bluetooth didn't work. Tried to fix it, with an inofficial patch for the driver. No luck. Plugged in a Bluetooth dongle I use on another computer. Worked, obviously taking a driver from the same repository I activated for wifi. Connected my Sennheiser wireless in-ears. Recognized as some kind of hands-free communication device. No sound.

Kind of the same experience I have made over and over in the past. And, we're talking about the big distros here, I haven't even touched the smaller ones. Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, OpenSUSE, you name it.

How anyone can mess with Linux is a mystery for me. Unless you have a masochistic side, I'd stay far away from it. A lot of work, with little to no reward.

And, the so praised compatibility with old hardware is non existant either.

Edited March 24 by chakkman

[datiswous]

35 minutes ago, chakkman said:

How anyone can mess with Linux is a mystery for me. Unless you have a masochistic side, I'd stay far away from it. A lot of work, with little to no reward.

It all boils down to if it detects your hardware. I don't have any issues with this lately, but maybe that laptop has very specific hardware.

my experience with Linux on most pc's: I boot it up, everything works.

Edited March 24 by datiswous

[chakkman]

1 hour ago, datiswous said:

my experience with Linux on most pc's: I boot it up, everything works.

That's exactly the contrary to my experiences with quite a few PCs I tried Linux on.

[Lzocast]

It's what is jokingly referred to as "The Linux Curse".

Some folks, like those who have already chimed in, and myself, install various flavours (distros) on a variety of machines and never have a problem. Done everything from 2012 era MacBooks through to a modern, custom built gaming PC and only once had to tweak an install; ironically on the newest machine because the distro I chose for it was running an older kernel that didn't have the drivers for the shiny new wifi card baked in. Had I picked something using a more recent version of the Kernel it would have also worked out of the box.

Then you have other folks who get nothing but broken installs, missing drivers, odd behaviour, and so on. Almost as if a daemon (ha!) within the system had taken a personal dislike to them.

There are ways to guarantee an, 'out of the box' experience with Linux if you have the time to devote to checking hardware support, which Kernel your desired distro is using (i.e. what driver sets it will come with by default), whether your preferred distro plays nice with the default bios settings on your machine (I'm looking at you Secure Boot) and so on. There are even distros that specialize in 'old' hardware and deliberately include driver packages the mainline Kernel has dropped support for.

[taffernicus]

i was tempted to vote linux-what the hell is glibc because i was wondering what could happen if we totally stripped libc or glibc out  from Unix-like OS and how the hell someone compile a program without libc ( i must try this, I've never done it before ). i heard that requires tinkering with _start entry point on linux and playing with syscall

 

i'm using windows 11 and latest ubuntu MATE (mate desktop)

Edited March 24 by taffernicus

[chakkman]

45 minutes ago, Lzocast said:

It's what is jokingly referred to as "The Linux Curse".

Some folks, like those who have already chimed in, and myself, install various flavours (distros) on a variety of machines and never have a problem.

Really? You never ha a problem with Linux? Like, ever? Not a single one? Not even a small one?

See, I had multiple issues with Windows and Mac OS over the years. But, Linux really takes the cake in that regard. As mentioned, if you don't even get all the hardware working, then that's way beyond anything I experienced on other OSs.

And, no offense meant, but, that "I never had a problem" recollection is surely connected to the fact that Linux is free, and the religion many Linux users make out of their OS, and open source in general.

Again, if you never had a single problem, then you're either the luckiest guy on earth (unlikely), or you simply don't see problems as problems, but a means to perfect your IT skills.  

[Lzocast]

I can concede that there's a mountain of wiggle room in what you consider, 'a problem'. Probably helps I have a very simple usecase. I just need something that can launch a web browser, play some single player games, and do some light video editing and coding work.

I'll also clarify that my response was purely in the context of installing it as that was what had been talked about. Day to day problem solving and tinkering; the smoothest experience is/was macOS. Only catastrophic problems I've ever faced (bricked drive) was under Windows. Linux sits in the middle of the three for me overall if we're evaluating the OS's as a whole.

And no, I am not evangelizing the OS, its a tool not a religion. Something having no buy in cost does up the amount of effort I'm willing to put in to using it though. I'm also career IT, use Linux for work, and maintain a lot of equipment that uses it under the hood, so that undoubtedly also factors in how 'easy to use' I find it.

[chakkman]

Since Windows XP, Windoes has been rock solid for me. Windows ME was a living catastrophy, and, I had quite a few issues with Windows 95 and 98 as well. The days when the OS still could completely crash on you.  Don't think my current Windows 11 machine has EVER crashed on me. Or the Windows 10 machine I had before that.

I actually forgot to say that, when I installed Ubuntu a couple of days ago, first thing that happened when the system was running was that the updater crashed on me.  Thankfully, that didn't happen again when I did the updates.

As I mentioned, that's kind of the usual for me with Linux. Either in the live versions or when installed: Something immediately crashes on you. They may fix it later, but, fkn hell. Must not happen. I'm a user, no system administrator.

I never HAD to use the console on Windows. I use Powershell for some stuff, because I want to. On Linux, first thing to do when having installed Linux is hack in the console, to fix stuff. That's my experience. And, because everyone is an IT crack, I, of course, have to get all the info from the net, and don't know exactly what I'm doing, when I hack in the commands. Doesn't help either, that most of them are so cryptic.

Anyway, enough ranted. Just wanted to point out my personal experiences with it.

Edited March 24 by chakkman

[New Horizon]

I voted Windows 10 and 11 but I also have an intel iMac with OS 15.7.3

[nbohr1more]

17 hours ago, I.C.H.I. said:

Even though I use the latest Windows but if you drop the older OS support it will cut off the people who may play TDM on a very old hardware which doesn't support the newer Windows. TBH this game is not in a position of neglecting their user base like that because I don't see the popularity ever growing. Literally nobody talks about The Dark Mod outside of this forum, even streamers almost never play it unlike games in Thief series.

Another reason why I don't see the necessity in this is because TDM doesn't use DirectX 12, so what is the point of doing that?

Microsoft has removed the old MSVC Community Editions so you can only get MSVC 2026 Community Edition. This has motivated us to move to newer C++ standards. There's a good chance that even these changes will be fine for older OS versions as long as the C++ runtimes can be installed there. This thread is just to make some determinations since supporting older OS's also sometimes takes extra work and might prevent some improvements.

For Linux our build standard is "very ancient" ( Ubuntu 16.04 ) so it's well overdue for us to move to something newer that works with reasonably updated distributions.

All this said, now that Steam / Proton make running Windows software so much better, it's probably best if you are on a system that cannot run Windows 11 that you move to a user friendly Linux version so that you will continue to get security updates so you aren't swimming in malware while trying to play TDM.

[Bikerdude]

19 hours ago, stgatilov said:

Sorry for the not-very-obvious versioning for Linux. It seems that glibc version is the only thing that's important for binary compatibility.

So apparently the latest version of CachyOS comes with glibc 2.43, and 2.42 for Bazzite.

[Bikerdude]

19 minutes ago, nbohr1more said:

For Linux our build standard is "very ancient" ( Ubuntu 16.04 ) so it's well overdue for us to move to something newer that works with reasonably updated distributions.

I tested 2.13 on Bazzite/CachyOS and from memory I think it was faster than Windows 10 and posted the results on here I believe. 

So if by using a new build standard will make it faster, even better.

[datiswous]

GLIBC 2.39 for me

[Xolvix]

GLIBC 2.42 (Ubuntu 25.10)

As for Linux being a bunch of bullshit at times, that's absolutely true. But then again, Windows can be a bunch of bullshit as well. You just have to settle for which bunch of bullshit you can live with daily, and unfortunately I'm just tired, so tired of Microsoft's abuse of its userbase that I'm done. I had to move, but it took years of learning Linux until I was at a level I was satisfied I could maintain it comfortably. Not everyone is willing to do that and I get it.

[taffernicus]

16 hours ago, chakkman said:

Since Windows XP, Windoes has been rock solid for me. Windows ME was a living catastrophy, and, I had quite a few issues with Windows 95 and 98 as well. The days when the OS still could completely crash on you.  Don't think my current Windows 11 machine has EVER crashed on me. Or the Windows 10 machine I had before that.

I actually forgot to say that, when I installed Ubuntu a couple of days ago, first thing that happened when the system was running was that the updater crashed on me.  Thankfully, that didn't happen again when I did the updates.

As I mentioned, that's kind of the usual for me with Linux. Either in the live versions or when installed: Something immediately crashes on you. They may fix it later, but, fkn hell. Must not happen. I'm a user, no system administrator.

I never HAD to use the console on Windows. I use Powershell for some stuff, because I want to. On Linux, first thing to do when having installed Linux is hack in the console, to fix stuff. That's my experience. And, because everyone is an IT crack, I, of course, have to get all the info from the net, and don't know exactly what I'm doing, when I hack in the commands. Doesn't help either, that most of them are so cryptic.

Anyway, enough ranted. Just wanted to point out my personal experiences with it.

Realtek has long been the bane of the Linux community—I’m not sure about other chipsets. Bluetooth can also be problematic on Windows (I’ve experienced this). Maybe you’re using a Realtek Wi-Fi adapter? 

 

Bluetooth uses the same frequency as Wi-Fi anyway, and as far as I recall, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on laptops share the same antenna. Maybe that’s causing interference

 

I was leaning toward System76, ThinkPad, dell latitude and Framework laptops due to compatibility issues and prioritizing the out-of-the-box experience for linux

 

I often dream of Linux matching the software/hardware synergy of macOS

 

And it’s very easy for Apple to develop Macs (especially for hardware drivers, resulting in fewer issues) because they don’t have to support thousands of devices from thousands of different vendors like Linux does

 

I don’t use a Mac, but the stability and user-friendliness described by my colleagues who use Macs are truly convincing

 

Mac is one of the OSes with certified UNIX status from the Open Group (for certain reasons)

 

But every OS has its own strengths and weaknesses

 

 

Edited March 25 by taffernicus

[taffernicus]

While the linux flakiness still there , Looking back at how some kernel developers made Linux easier to use makes me feel even more grateful.

 

Among them are Alan Cox (who created the modular sound driver in Linux), Ted Tso for maintaining ext4 Filesystem, Larry Finger (who made countless contributions to wireless drivers), and whoever made X11 autoconfiguration less of a hassle so you dont meed to manually edit the .conf everytime, whoever made XFree86 or X.org less of a hassle, whoever out there created tools like the HardDrake hardware prober in the old Mandrake Linux distro (and there was also the Kudzu daemon back then), and whoever created udev (the Red Hat team, if I’m not mistaken—there used to be the HAL tool that predated this)

 

And the GUI installer and UI-based partitioning that’s getting easier,  Proton gaming in Linux and so on

 

 

 

[datiswous]

4 hours ago, taffernicus said:

I don’t use a Mac, but the stability and user-friendliness described by my colleagues who use Macs are truly convincing

I've used it here and there, but I don't see what's the fuss about.

[waxhead]

I am a Debian user, and don't usually play games much but TheDarkMod is a notable exception.

As for native Linux versions I hope you will consider targeting the largest mother distros like Debian and RedHat first and foremost, but also other mother distros like OpenSUSE, Arch, Slackware, Gentoo, etc.... etc... All of which forms the basis for lots of other distros.

That way you would get a lot of distros "supported" for free. The rationale being that if it works on the mother distro that the descendants pull from, it should normally work (or be easy to pull in missing dependencies) further down the line as well.

And just for the record Ubuntu is based off Debian so that is why I did not mention it. (And in all honestly, I also don't like Ubuntu either just to play with open cards).