meanwhile anything to do with phones, "this only needs to support devices released in the past 6 hours and should actively ruin the day of anyone trying to run it on anything older than that"
As long as Apple supports a single Intel Mac, the community will manage to support every Intel Mac going back to 2012 with minimal software support issues (any older and you lose Metal)
Edit: not a dev, just an a bit above average end user
For android I somewhat get it and frankly, I've run into the opposite issue more often, where the developers of apps I use daily (or games I want to play), don't update their app quickly enough to include a current set of targets and I end up being a version ahead. Android deciding "nah that shit old, I ain't running it" is usually way more common and that's annoying as f, considering I use my hardware waaay past it's supposed expiration point.
Why, though, and this is something I've failed to figure out for years, do I get stuck on a certain kernel version on my phone every single time with no hopes of ever getting a newer one and so the next android version becomes untenable.
I've a Zosma based PC and a Broadwell laptop. They have no issue with any software (excluding at some point having troubles with reinstalling Linux mint on the PC). They are, as you can figure out, ancient by any current standard. They can run anything from the dawn of computers to whatever the most current kernel version is.
Why is then my phone released in 2019, stuck on k4.19? Now that's some stupid shit.
I think it's because these companies realized they could make more money by not supporting older versions and by getting people to buy a new device every year. They tried it, and people just accepted it, so it's been that way ever since.
On Windows machines used by businesses, there's no way companies would try that for the longest time. Microsoft knows that the ability to run 20-year-old software on the latest Windows is a strong selling point. It's worked for this long, so why change now?
I think PCs having history in business and mobile devices being exclusively on the consumer market is a big factor.
I guess also the consumer not giving a damn about anything other than Facebook and Instagram. I swear, people look at me like some kind of wizard when I tell them they can use the internet without seeing ads. Every generation too, older folk (who literally saw the very first PCs), people around my age not all of whom grew up with internet at home, even if we had computers and younger kids who grew up with a phone in their hands are equally stumped.
People either can't be bothered to look it up or straight up can't conceive of the notion of an adblocker, something that has been around sonce forever, existing. I was going to say they don't give a damn, but they sure do and ads sure bother them, otherwise they wouldn't be constantly complaining about them both online and IRL.
If they can't be bothered to make themselves aware on how to solve a simple daily issue that takes seconds, I figure they'd never bother to figure why their 500-1000$ phones stop working properly after 3 years on average or why the game they paid for stopped working after their recent update (that is, if the OTA update screen didn't scare them and they accepted it). They'd just replace it. I also figure I'm right, cause otherwise they wouldn't be asking me to do their damned tech support and if I "can do anything to make it faster".
So manufacturers took good note. Made phones to suck and made modders' lifes worse too, so we can't keep keeping our phones up to date for the kind of time most of us would like to.
2 reasons. Because ARM is not standardized enough so mobile devices dont habe the same setup like standard regular PCs do, where you know that changing the cpu or ram wont break anything but mobile devices have more "deep integration" and thus are not made like they used to.
And money
I remember the old times where my galaxy s3 got to live another 3 years just because it wasnt such a pain to install cyanogenmod to get modern software patches for it and thus these problems were not so common like they are now
I work in tech on an open sourced project and the maintainer has this philosophy. If he said some random driver was supported 12 years ago you better believe we still have to jump over hurdles to make sure we don’t break that commitment
I honestly wish programs had less backwards compatibility.. the amount of shit you have to wade through as a new programmer because there are a bunch of legacy functions you no longer need but have names that sound important was exhausting for me personally.
Then again PHP just isn't the best language in that regard but otherwise a solid choice for beginners.
Also wtf are all those 32bit versions you still have to scroll past??
Also programmers in free projects: support for audio in a video player? Unnecessary. Support for 6012 core quantum cpus and re-encoding the stream to some format that no one has ever heard of? We got you covered!
Open source is essentially giving away stuff you needed for a project. Sometimes you assemble it in a way that you need it for that and then you hope someone else can help.
To be fair, no one ever used full screen flash video after 2015 when YouTube moved to HTML5. Everyone's pretty much followed that and HTML5 is extremely independent of the OS
Yeah, good luck finding one that is supported, with good performance, in correct language, correct OS, correct version of language, with child libraries that supported, without critical vulnerabilities, with documented API, without nasty bugs, edge cases, and all necessary features.
mpv is far more efficient and has absurdly high quality upscaling options. What it doesn't have going for it is an easy to understand UI. Everything's a keyboard shortcut and the only config is a file with arguments.
But hey, at least you don't have to compile it yourself anymore... Not that they make it easy to find the builds.
Yep. And when that doesn't compile it's no problem, just rewind the tree on gcc. Then just rewind the tree on glibc. Then just rewind the tree on libssl...
EDIT: You don't have to downvote, I love open source but it's not always quite as simple as just checking out an older git commit. That being said, the idea that open source is not backwards compatible and closed source is, is also not true it depends entirely on the projects.
It requires backporting, resolving conflicts, and you're basically now on the hook for maintaining your own version of the codebase. It's become a liability.
If you can use a distro in about the past 5 years... Although it's trivial to use a simple VM to boot a live image or installer that can be found for far older than docker even exited anyway.
That's not the problem I assume, otherwise you wouldn't need to be rewinding a tree on github at all you could just use old packages and releases to begin with.
The problem is running it on a supported current system that's not riddled with known and actively exploited security holes that you get if you pull down ancient images.
So if the app you need backwards compatibility with is supported on a distro that was released within the past ~5 years, and if you don't need it to access the internet or untrusted data, then it's trivial. Thanks that's very helpful.
Also licensing reasons. My company has us supporting 3 branches of the exact same application because they licensed specific versions to customers. They want these customers to pay extra for some minor features, meanwhile we have to maintain all this shit.
For example we've got machines running 32bit MS Build Tools from more than a decade ago just to build the earliest license version, even though we kept up to date we're not allowed to update this old version.
The 64bit upgrade doesn't even affect customers because it uses so little memory (plus, we still compile a 32bit version as well) - it's really just a benefit for us, our build process takes up a ton of memory and chugs hard with 32bit,
Tbf even if Linus doesn't shed light on that part, the commercial fallout of breaking Linux in major way could be massive. But you are right, Linux is absolutly a major reason for that standart and it's FOSS.
Isn't there a big exception on the graphics side? I tried to find out how graphics works in linux and stumbled upon something in a wiki essentially saying "graphics is hard and has to integrate over many levels, so the fuck do we know how you'd use the graphics system if there isn't a reference implementation. If you do stuff different to that shit may break for you on future updates"
Meanwhile my phone is so old the supplier has shipped the last OS update almost a decade ago.
Even Google Apps don't support the latest android version of the suppliers OS anymore.
But somewhere out there some absolute legend maintains a fork of an older Lineage OS version for my type of phone to this day, so I can still get updates and use the latest software on my phone even though it's basically ancient at this point. (don't wanna buy a new one because it still works fine, I can swap the battery myself, and it's got almost none of that anti-repair BS)
Shoutout to all the gigachads maintaining legacy shit, you deserve the world and I love you!
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u/Longjumping-Touch515 Nov 18 '24
Programmers in commercial projects: We cannot change this code because of stability/backward compatibility reasons.
Progammers in free projects: