Maybe because that actually stopped getting updated, and a fork continuing it exists?

Flatpak is definitely a possible solution. We will see how it will be managed in the future

To allow modern windows to run legacy applications a lot of caution is given to updating libraries or fully new ones are given while keeping the older ones. Also static builds are more common on Windows, or come bundled with a copy of the required libraries as .dll files.

• Let’s say an application requires libexample1. It works, the library is available too.
• Eventually the application gets abandoned, but still works.
• But eventually a libexample2 gets released that drastically changes how the library works. The program doesn’t work on this version. The older release of the library then get’s abandoned.
• Distributions now start removing the package from the repositories as the older library is slowly requiring no longer supported releases of its own dependency.
• Now application is borked

Aplication could have still worked if it came bundled with its own copy of libexample1 and of its dependencies, or was statically linked.

An example of this is Nero, a software kit for managing CD/DVD disc media. They made a build of some of their tools for Linux, meant to run on Debian 7. This builds were an experiment and got abandoned because of the very few users it had. Yet, these tools still work perfectly fine on Debian 12 despite being based on ancient libraries because it bundles all its requirements as a copy in its own proprietary blob.

I talked about caution on updating libraries on Windows. You can find many deprecated methods in any native Windows library that will likely never be removed from the library binaries, as many applications require it. The new, better and more feature rich method is given a different name instead, and is pointed out in the documentation for the older method.

Projects like FUSE are very nice for this, where an AppImave bundle of prebuilt binaries is given and can potencially not only be ran everywhere that can run FUSE but also in the future too.

I don’t understand why there is no such projects as mature on Linux. With access to plugins for the most used desktop environments you think it would actually be easier to implement. Running VLC borderless in the background is still the way many people suggest

One of the refunds reasons you can select is “the game doesn’t run on my PC”. This is completely valid.