Comment by yjftsjthsd-h
7 years ago
You know the saying about how no Excel user uses more than 10% of its features? But everyone uses a different 10%, so ~100% matters? I defy you to find me a business, or probably even a human, more than 2 years old (using computers for more than 2 years) and not using any "legacy" applications. We maintain compatibility for everyone, because everyone uses it.
Who is using these legacy applications and for what? 99% of people use a web browser only these days. As for myself, the closest thing I can think of some in-house legacy crap but even that was 10 years ago. The majority of businesses and humans don't have any of this. What kind of circles do you run in where people are routinely using legacy software?
You seem to think that software must be a continuously updated thing, or it becomes legacy. This is somewhat true in the current world, but it is massively wasteful and unnecessary. It should be normal for software to be finished, and one should expect finished software to keep working for many years.
One huge market where this does happen is games. Disregarding the current plague of microtransaction-funded 'live experiences', most games are pieces of software that get released and are mostly done, barring some added content going out for a year or two. Losing the ability to play these games because someone has decided that ABI compatibility is kinda hard is ridiculous, and would definitely not fly for a consumer OS.
It would be interesting for someone to try to apply this same argument to hardware: would it make sense to abandon old hardware support every release? Doing this with device drivers was one of the things which hurt Linux adoption on the desktop, and hurt Windows Vista's release immensely.
Overall, end-users do not and should not care for OS updates. They are a necessary evil, to help fix bugs that the OS developers missed that threaten their security; and to be able to use new applications that rely on new OS features. But breaking old applications or hardware is a massive pain point that makes users weary of updating despite the risk to their security.
> Losing the ability to play these games because someone has decided that ABI compatibility is kinda hard is ridiculous, and would definitely not fly for a consumer OS.
Old games have a tendancy to break reasons even without ABI breaks..
I think it's ridiculous that games are still primarily closed source binary blobs that cannot be easily fixed and patched by the users to keep them running fine for decades.
If you've walked into a bank, hospital, or anywhere using a PoS system, you've interacted with legacy software--in some cases, literally jury-rigged DOS software. Outside of trendy dev circles, legacy software is the name of the game.
OK, banks, hospitals. You forgot SCADA systems. How on earth do you leap from these to not only all business, but all humans?
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Just one anecdote - 10,000s of insurance staff work on software that’s been in maintenance mode since Windows 3.1. There are massive insurance companies that have been attempting to replace such software for more than 20 years.
Games?