I've switched away from FastSpring in 2021, when they outsourced their payouts to Hyperwallet (for me this change meant double currency exchange USD -> EUR -> USD with associated double exchange fees). It looks like FastSpring rolled further downhill since then. This reminds me of Plimus/Bluesnap collapse: when this kind of company runs of cash, its tends to establish various funny fees before finally flipping up.
Much of the Windows compatibility is "just" stable API for Windows controls, GUI event handling loops, 3D graphics and sound (DirectX). Linux has stable API for files and sockets (POSIX), but that's all.
And I am saying you don't need to rely on any of that. You can just ship it yourself (statically link, or use LD_LIBRARY_PATH). That's what Windows applications that rely on GTK or Qt do as well, and it works fine, which works well, and it works fine for Linux too. The basics (libc, libX, etc.) are stable, and the Linux kernel is stable.
And this is what Windows does too really, with MSVC and dotnet and whatnot redistributables. It's just that these things are typically included in the application if you need it.
It's really not that different aside from "Python vs. Ruby"-type-differences, which are are meaningful differences, but also actually aren't all that important.
Stop spreading FUD, X and OpenGL have maintained stable ABIs. There is Wayland now but even that comes with Xwayland doe maintain compat.
Sound is a bit more rocky but there are compatibility shims for OSS and alsa for newer audio architectures.
Stop claiming that I'm spreading FUD and show me at least one Linux app which was compiled to the binary code in 1996 and exactly that binary code still runs under modern Linux desktop environment and has similar visual style to the rest of builtin apps.
Got no counterexamples? Then it's not FUD at all, rather a pure truth.
There's one thing I can't understand in this story: if that's lawful interception, why Hetzner and Linode bothered to set up MitM interception with different LE certificate and key, rather than extract the TLS private key directly from the RAM and/or storage device of the VPS? Even if this is a physically dedicated server, they can extract the private key from the RAM by dumping the RAM contents after unscheduled reboot. Extraction of the private key isn't visible in CT logs, much more stealthier, practically undetectable.
There's also a possibility that one would be a "search" and the other would be an "interception" with different levels of approvals requested, but I don't know what the current legal situation in Germany is right now.
On a physical server, couldn't you just hotplug a PCIe card in there and DMA out any data you are interested in? Something like a network card with firmware specifically for the purpose should do it. It sounds so much a standard thing for law enforcement that I imagine such equipment should be available off the shelf?
The difference between modern days and days of DOS isn't in C/C++ compiler, it's in virtual memory and address space isolation and privilege isolation. So it's not a job of a C/C++ compiler to enforce protection from writing to "special" addresses, because interrupt table updates (and memory-mapped hardware I/O in general) still must happen somewhere (i.e. in kernel, hypervisor, drivers etc) and that code is still written in C/C++, same as in the DOS era.
I still use Windows 7 + Firefox + third-party personal firewall (to control network activity on per-process level). Despite FUD from Microsoft trolls, I have not had any malware in the last 10 years.
If the last two versions of their OS are crap, then it makes sense to consider previous versions IMO.
