[pornel]

The situation today is very different than what it used to be when people actually used 386 or Amigas because they had no other options (BTW, Rust supports m68k, just not AmigaOS specifically).

Today even crappiest old PCs that you can fish out of a dumpster are already new enough to have Rust/LLVM support. We have mountains of Rust-compatible e-waste that you can save from landfill. Take whatever is cheapest on eBay, or given away on your local FB marketplace, and it will run Rust, and almost certainly be orders of magnitude faster and more practical than the unsupported retro hardware.

Using actual too-niche-for-Rust hardware today is more expensive. Such machines are often collectors' items, and need components and accessories that are hard to obtain, or need replacements/adapters that can be custom low-volume products.

Even if you can put together something from old-but-not-museum-yet parts, it's not going to make more sense economically than getting an older-gen Raspberry PI kit or its Ali Express knock-offs (there are VGA dongles more expensive than some of these boards).

It's fine to appreciate SGI and DEC Alpha, have fun using BE OS, or prove that AmigaOS is still a perfectly fine daily driver, but let's not pretend it's a situation that people are in due to economic hardship.

[grayhatter]

> but let's not pretend it's a situation that people are in due to economic hardship.

I'd encourage you to not strawman my response. Because I already said myself that it appears to me it's only hobbyists who are losing support.

My objection isn't to the argument that it's dropping support, my objection is that it's dropping support without cause. Other than, the assumed this would be more comfortable for me.

Maintainers are absolutely not required to support everything for ever, but I recall a story where someone from Linux paid for a user to upgrade, not because that was required, because more because that would make dropping support for that floppy driver feel ethical.

This is the level of compassion everyone should expect from software engineers in critical positions of power.

I have no sympathy for people who lack the compassion to expend the effort to help others. I do have sympathy for people who have to watch the world that they, even if it's them alone. Have to watch their world get worse, so that others can avoid a trivial amount of perceived discomfort.

Should this solo maintainer (who understands C) be required do things exactly the way that I want? Of course not, but I'll be damned if everyone expects me to remain silent while I watch them disrespect other people who were previously depending on their support.

[pornel]

By alluding the switch to Rust was "without cause", and bringing up concerns of floppy users and retro-hobby hardware, you seem to be seeing the change only from a very narrow perspective of interests of very specific group of users.

There are lots of other users, and lots of other ways to care about them. Making software less likely to have vulnerabilities is caring about its users too. Making software work better and faster on contemporary hardware is caring about users too, just a different group (and a way larger one, and including users who really can't afford faster hardware).

Sometimes it's just not possible to make everyone happy, and even just keeping the status quo is not always a free option. Hypothetically, keeping working support for some weird floppy drive may be increasing overall system complexity, and cost dev and testing effort that might have been spent on something else that benefitted a larger number of users more.

Switching to a language with a friendlier compiler, fewer gotchas, less legacy cruft, and less picky dependency management can also be a way of caring about users - lowering the barriers to contributing productively can help get more contributions, fewer bugs, improve the software overall, and empower more users to modify their tools.

It'd be fine to argue which trade-offs are better, and which groups users should be prioritized, but it's disingenuous to frame not accommodating the retro/hobby usecases in particular a sign of lack of compassion in general. It could be quite the opposite - focusing only on the status quo and past problems shows lack of care about all the other users and the future of the software.