I recently wanted to run tegaki, and my experience is pretty much summed up by the meme. I consider myself fairly tech-savvy, but I just couldn't figure out how to compile it. So I just gave up, downloaded the .exe and put it into a fresh wine prefix. After installing CJK fonts, everything ran fine. Now I'm trying to get gpaint to work. ~~My distro recently dropped support for gtk+2 (which I am fairly pissed about, since it's the last good version of GTK+), so I have to set that up manually as well.~~ [[[ EDIT: gtk2 is alive and well. I was just being and idiot and searching for gtk2, when the package is actually called gtk+2. ]]] I installed all of the dependencies that ./configure told me to, but I still kept getting obscure errors when running make.
So, here's my question: what tools make the process of running abandonware easier? Docker containers? Also, what can I use to package abandonware in order to make it easy for other people to run? Flatpak? Appimages? Any advice is appreciated!
Also, inb4 "just find a modern alternative". That would be a reasonable solution. I don't want reasonable solutions!
Sometimes you can have a similar experience trying to get abandoned Windows software to work too. Found myself in DLL/OCX hell trying to get an obscure old Windows game to work in Bottles.
And if that wasn't bad enough, after installing Bottles' Flatpak (the first and only Flatpak I've ever used), the system decided to activate hourly Timeshift backups despite that being disabled in Timeshift's config. I invoked the power of irony and told Timeshift to take the system back to a pre-Bottles state, and lo, everything behaved again.
I love bottles. Especially the flatpak version, since I don't have to worry about w*ndows programs shitting up my filesystem. And the recent per-bottle sandbox feature is also great for running semi-untrusted applications without needing to toggle things in Flatseal every time. I do wish Bottles kept support for winetricks tho. Recently wanted to run M$ Paint (the XP version), and it just wouldn't work with Bottles. Ended up installing the official Wine flatpak and using winetricks from there (it comes pre-installed).