MBS Plugins backwards compatibility to older operation systems

In general we recommend you use a recent Windows version and a recent Linux distribution, so you have all the security fixes. But sometimes we get asked about support of older versions.

We tried the 24.4 plugins on Windows 7, Windows 8 and Ubuntu 18 to verify what works. Here are the results:

Plugin Part Windows Linux
Scintilla Scintilla GLIBCXX_3.4.26
Barcode zxing2 VS 2019 Runtimes GLIBCXX_3.4.26
Win Win Windows 8 needed
Win WinUserNotification Windows 8 needed
WinFrameworks WinPDF Windows 8 needed
WinFrameworks WinOCR Windows 8 needed
WinFrameworks WindowsStore Windows 8 needed
WinFrameworks WindowsML Windows 8 needed
WinFrameworks WinBluetoothLE Windows 8 needed
WinFrameworks WebView2 Windows 8 needed

From 405 plugin parts, almost all just work. But on Windows we have the newer classes requiring Windows 10 and in order to load they need APIs from Windows 8. And the newer zxing plugin part needs Visual Studio 2019 runtime files, which should be installed on a Windows 10 or 11 machine automatically by Windows update. Otherwise you can manually install them.

You can download Visual Studion 2019 runtime installers here: The latest supported Visual C++ downloads or direct download.

For Linux there is a dependency to a newer C++ library for Scintilla and zxing2 parts. If you updated the packages or got a newer Ubuntu version or a recent other distribution, you should have this library.

3 Likes

No such problems on Macs?

No. MacOS is all 10.13 and higher.
On macOS we can dynamically do things, so the plugin loads on older version and doesn’t do anything useful. e.g. an Available property would just be false.

1 Like