Linux Vs. FreeBSD 7127

imotgm

Admittedly, none, but that's not the point. The point is that because of universal binary compatibility described in my previous post, this is not an issue. Whoever makes the program packages it once and it will work on any modern version of Windows. This package once, works everywhere paradigm makes it so that you basically never run into a Windows app that is distributed in some difficult-to-install form, such as source only, or a zip file (the Windows equivalent to a tar.gz file) with missing dependencies. In other words, unless your version of Windows is prehistoric, you cannot have a version of Windows that there is not a pre-compiled package with simple point-and-click install for it. Actually, I suppose technically, a program *could* be offered as a zip file with dependencies missing, but this almost never happens in practice. In contrast, on Linux a program has to be re-packaged for every distro, or at least every family of distros, and this realistically has to be done by the maintainer of the distro, not the maintainer of the package, in many cases. This takes time and causes all sorts of headaches, and if the package is fairly obscure, it may not happen at all.