zlacker

I've recently had to do this (to bisect when a change introduced a superficial bug into a 20-year-old program). I think "simply run" is viewing Linux of that era through rose-tinted glasses.

Even for simple 2D "Super VGA" you're needing to choose the correct XFree86 implementation and still tweak your Xorg configuration. The emulated hardware also has bugs, since most of the focus is now on virtio drivers.

(The 20-year-old program was linked against libsdl, which amusingly means on my modern system it supports Wayland with no issues.)

>>terinj+(OP)
Plus there are other advantages that I always say should never be discounted, such as desktop integration, that you get when you can replace the toolkit (dynamic) libraries rather than just "running everything in a VM". Running everything in a VM is a poor excuse for backwards compatibility.