In practice, on Windows, one can still use most things made 25 years ago. In actuality, I still use WinAmp 2.91 marked "Apr 16 2003" in the about screen. See also http://www.oldversion.com/ .
Re:I’m now in charge of Audacity [video]
by sudosysgen on Friday April 30, 2021 @06:22PM
(#27000214)
It's pretty simple to build audacity. If you're never upgrading then that's fine.
Re:I’m now in charge of Audacity [video]
by schmorptron on Saturday May 01, 2021 @07:53AM
(#27005519)
In theory, flatpaks will have perfect forwards compatibility, unless some breaking changed occur without them supporting the old format in a legacy way, which seems unlikely.
In practice, especially on Linux, binaries only work for specific distributions of specific major versions. It can be very difficult to get a binary to work a few years down the line.
Of course solutions like Appimage help quite a bit as software comes with most dependencies packaged inside but even then its not perfect. It will slow down the bit rot but not stop it.