Arguably, WINE has always been the most stable ABI on Linux. Good luck just getting a 5-year-old binary of any desktop file manager running on a modern Linux installation.
I’m dead serious. Grab a copy of Nautilus or GNOME Files from Ubuntu 16.04; try running it on Ubuntu 22.04. It isn’t easy. Now imagine a game.
This is only because of the nature of dynamic linking. Have a statically linked executable and you should be fine. Not that it should be an issue to get old software to run you simply need to download the dependent lib versions.
Anyone who sais this i feel hasnt worked very much with software, not that you should need to thats up to the one distributing the executable
What you mean is: the only stable ABI in Linux is the Linux kernel’s itself.
Windows is the opposite: the only stable ABI is the dynamically linked user space ABI. So yes, it’s perfectly possible to have a stable dynamic ABI across a dynamically linked boundary.
Your example doesn't make sense. Linux distributions have always had this trade off: Binaries provided through the package manager work with the libraries that are provided by the same package manager. I have a bunch of older gog or Humble Bundle Linux releases of games that still work fine on my system because (Windows style) they carry around all of their libraries with them. Linking Xorg doesn't make sense and applications linked statically against libX11 will work perfectly fine even with Xwayland.
https://www.x.org/wiki/Releases/https://www.gtk.org/docs/installations/linux/
I mean it will probably not be painless and other applications u run might break* but xorg is relativly stable.
Liba are out there are free to get. Usually people are arguing that the conveniences isnt there not that its not possible.
* if u dont sandbox this a bit with custom lib paths
