[searls]

At what point in history have you owned a particular piece of hardware for use with a particular piece of never-to-be-updated software and installed a major OEM operating system release a full 7 years after release without issue?

I doubt such a thing has ever happened in the history of consumer-facing computing.

[Kwpolska]

Have you ever heard of Windows? Unlike Apple, they do care about backwards compatibility, and don’t randomly go removing features users depend on.

[pjmlp]

Also they aren't the only ones, this is pretty much standard across commercial UNIXes (the survivors), embedded OSes, mainframes and micros.

[iknowstuff]

and the consequences are dire

[Rohansi]

Are they? IMO Windows going downhill has more to do with what is being added to it than what it is preserving compatibility for.

[palmotea]

> At what point in history have you owned a particular piece of hardware for use with a particular piece of never-to-be-updated software and installed a major OEM operating system release a full 7 years after release without issue?

> I doubt such a thing has ever happened in the history of consumer-facing computing.

Come on. I've done that and still do: I use an ancient version of Adobe Acrobat that I got with a student discount more than 10 years ago to scan documents and manipulate PDFs. I'd probably switch to an open source app, if one were feature comparable, but I'm busy and honestly don't have the time to wade through it all (and I've got a working solution).

Adobe software is ridiculously overpriced, and I'm sure many, many people have done the same when they had perpetual-use licenses.

[csdreamer7]

> At what point in history have you owned a particular piece of hardware for use with a particular piece of never-to-be-updated software and installed a major OEM operating system release a full 7 years after release without issue?

Linux users do it all the time with WINE/Proton. :-)

Before you complain about the term 'major OEM operating system'; Ubuntu is shipped on major OEMs and listed in the supported requirements of many pieces of hardware and software.

> I doubt such a thing has ever happened in the history of consumer-facing computing.

Comments like this show how low standards have fallen. Mac OS X releases have short support lengths. The hardware is locked down-you need a massive RE effort just to get Linux to work. The last few gens of x86 Mac hardware did not have as much, but it was still locked down. M3 or M4 still do not have a working installer. None of this is funded by Apple to get it working on Linux or to get Windows ARM working on it as far as I know.

In comparison, my brother in-law found an old 32bit laptop that had Windows 7. It forced itself without his approval to update to Windows 10. It had support for 10 years from Microsoft with just 10. 7 pushed that 10 to... hmm... 13+ years of support?

[nomel]

> Linux users do it all the time with WINE/Proton. :-)

And there’s a near 100% chance you’ll have to recompile/download pre-re-compiled binaries if moving to a completely different architecture. Same here.

[Dylan16807]

Not the same here. The user didn't have to get different binaries when they changed hardware, and that was a big selling point for the hardware. And now it's going to break in an arbitrary software update.

[nomel]

They did if they moved from x86 to ARM.

[Dylan16807]

There's some kind of massive communication breakdown or misunderstanding going on.

In "Not the same here”, "here" is people moving to M1. So no they very much didn't, that was the whole point of rosetta 2.

[csdreamer7]

Not sure what you are saying. If you saying you need the gamedev to recompile for arm you can run a virtualization layer, just like Mac and Windows. My friend has had the best results with: https://fex-emu.com/

[gucci-on-fleek]

> At what point in history have you owned a particular piece of hardware [...] and installed a major OEM operating system release a full 7 years after release without issue?

A few years ago, I installed Windows 10 on a cheap laptop from 2004—the laptop was running Windows XP, had 1GB of memory, a 32-bit-only processor, and a 150GB hard drive. The computer didn't support USB boot, but once I got the installer running, it never complained that the hardware was unsupported.

To be fair, the computer ran horrendously slow, but nothing ever crashed on me, and I actually think that it ran a little bit faster with Windows 10 than with Windows XP. And I used this as my daily driver for about 4 months, so this wasn't just based off of a brief impression.