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Why Software is Incompatible Across Platforms

Software that has been designed for one operating system cannot be used on another. This is due to the incompatibility across platforms and the nature of the code that is written for these applications. An application that is being written for the windows platform will have optimizations and routines that make use of the OS features. These methods will not be effective on a Linux system and users cannot port the application and use it as efficiently on a different platform. This is the reason applications are designed and developed for their target platforms. If the developer has no support for the platform that you are currently on, you will not be able to make use of the application.

Whenever you are installing software on your system, it makes a check to ensure that it is being installed on the correct operating system. If there are additional support libraries that will need to be installed, you are asked to connect to the internet for the additional packages. The installation process also runs a check to confirm that you are running on a compatible version of the operating system. This is due to the reason that the software will be making use of OS libraries to keep it running efficiently. If you are running an older version of the operating system, these libraries will not be present and you will find the software crashing and not running as efficiently as you would expect it to. Without the correct support libraries, management of the software will also become more complicated in the sense that the application will not be properly coordinated. If the software makes use of threading to optimize its performance, the lack of correct support libraries will cause it to be very slow and unresponsive. The application will keep hanging and will end up frustrating the user with slow performance.

Software that has been designed for Linux platforms only perform well on these systems. They will not provide the same level of performance on the other systems and communication with the operating systems will be affected. They will tend to be very slow and unresponsive even if you do manage to port them as their mapping to operating system commands will have been modified. The only way you can be able to run software on another platform is through virtualization. Virtualization runs another operating system inside a sandbox environment and here you can install the appropriate operating system on which you can run your application without running into issues.

Virtualization requires the use of a powerful computer and you have to allocate part of your hardware and processing resources to the guest operating system. Once this is done, you will then get to install that operating system on the spare resources on your computer. Operating inside a virtual environment makes it possible for you to keep using the software application that are not compatible with your current operating system. It lets you experience the same software from the comfort of a sandbox.