[br073n]

I believe it's less important we allow running old software on a new OS, as it is we find a way to support older OSes, or at least older essential elements. I'm told the fundamental issue of incompatibility is the often radical changes in the underlying Glibc core. We need not burden new versions of Glibc with so much backward compatibility, as perhaps enable compat by enabling the system to run different versions at the same time. I know we've done some of that before, but not so much lately.

I doubt VM is the way to go just yet. Something short of that, such as a built-in emulator, might cover it. Wine is already making great strides to solving the old, "you can't run Winware on Linux" issue. Indeed, for a brief period our DOSemu was a better DOS than you found on XP, but the latest release breaks some of my old DOS apps. To our shame, it's easier to emulate older Linux on FreeBSD than it is on Linux, and do it seamlessly.

As for word processing, I now do it all in XHTML, and link to a printer CSS. It's the universal format, more portable than plain text for printing. For really long printed stuff, I use Lyx, because those documents are never requested for sharing on anything but paper. Word Processing is already about dead in some areas of business communications.

Some new ideas really are better than old ones.