[schmuckonwheels]

>including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF

Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK, and your choice of 167 different desktop environments. Don't forget the whole Wayland schism.

Mac is no better, shifting SDKs every few years, except Apple goes one step further by breaking all legacy applications so you are forced to upgrade. Can't be schizo when you salt the earth and light a match to everything that came before the Current Thing.

[steve1977]

macOS has Cocoa since 2000, which is still useable, and SwiftUI since a few years. No comparison to the mess of UI toolkits on Windows.

[schmuckonwheels]

And what about Carbon?

Gone.

32-bit apps?

Gone.

PowerPC stuff? Anything more than a few years old?

Forget it.

You can't even run versions of iPhoto or iTunes after they deliberately broke them and replaced them with objectively shittier equivalents. Their own apps!

Windows can still run programs from the 90s unmodified. There are VB6 apps from 1998 talking to Access databases still running small businesses today.

Can't say the same for either Mac or Linux.

It's not really a problem for Apple because their userbase is content to re-buy all their software every 5 years.

[steve1977]

Well, that's true. It's an interesting point actually. Windows certainly wins in terms of binary compatibility.

I was thinking more about the developer perspective, i.e. churn in terms of frameworks. Yes, PowerPC is gone. Intel will be gone soon.

But both the transitions from PowerPC to Intel as well as from Intel to ARM were pretty straightforward for developers if you were using Cocoa and not doing any assembly stuff.

Carbon only every was a bandaid to give devs some time for the transition to Cocoa.

[schmuckonwheels]

Maybe I am a bit jaded, but with Apple's yearly OS release cycle — and breaking things nearly every time — I grew sick and tired of software I spent good money or relied on suddenly not working anymore.

Imagine taking your car in for an oil change annually and the radio stopped working when you got it back. It's incompatible with the new oil, they say. You'd be furious.

With the Windows of yore this wasn't so much of an issue — with 5-10 years between upgrade cycles — and service packs in between — you could space it out.

When you work in the computer industry, there tends to be a disconnect with how they are used in the real world by real people — as tools. People grow accustomed to their tools and expect them to be reliable as opposed to some ephemeral service.

[seec]

I share your sentiment very strongly.

Apple's change for the sake of change is extremely annoying, especially since the changes have been regressions lately. They always push their commercial interest at the cost of their users, refusing to maintain stuff properly to save money.

At some point I had to change a Mac because the GPU wasn't compatible with some apps after they pushed their Metal framework. But it was working just fine for me, and I didn't really need to change it at this moment; Apple just decided so.

And if you use their software on different hardware and make the mistake of upgrading just one, it is very likely that you will have to upgrade the other because the newer software version won't be compatible with the older hardware (had the problem with Notes/Reminders database needing an OS upgrade to be able to sync).

Microsoft is all over the place, but at least it is very likely that you can get away with changing your hardware only once every 10 years if you buy high-end stuff.

[seanmcdirmid]

Is that a good or bad thing? Yes, Mac chops off legacy after a decade or so, but I don’t see not being able to run apps from the 90s as a problem (or if I did, I’d probably be running windows or Linux instead of Mac OS).

[addaon]

> 32-bit apps?

The Core 2 Duo, used in the last 32 bit Mac, was released in 2006.

> PowerPC stuff?

The last G5 PowerPCs were, similarly, discontinued in 2006.

> every 5 years.

20?

[schmuckonwheels]

Your stance is all software should die as soon as the generation of chip it was developed on stops being sold?

[addaon]

Sorry, I see how my post might have been somewhat unclear. No, my stance is that 2006 is closer to 20 years ago than 5 years ago.

[josefx]

> Can't say the same for either Mac or Linux.

From my own experience things tend to keep working on Linux if you package your own userland libraries instead of depending on the ever changing system libraries. More or less how you would do it on Windows.

Except Windows isn't perfect either, I had to deal with countless programs that required an ancient version of the c runtime, some weird database libraries that weren't installed by default and countless other Microsoft dependencies that somehow weren't part of the ever growing bloat.

[lossyalgo]

Even WinAmp 2.0 from 1998 still runs on Windows 11.

[hulitu]

> Windows can still run programs from the 90s unmodified.

Did _you_ tried ? Because i hear this mantra a lot on HN, but my experience is different. MDK ( the game) cannot _run_ on a current Windows.

[tavavex]

Although it's rare for me, I have used some old software that was built for Windows 9X or old versions of NT. So far, the track record is perfect - native programs have worked just fine, though I obviously can't vouch for all of them.

Old, complex games are the worst-case scenario, and are the exception, not the rule. Since they were only beginning to figure out hardware-accelerated 3D gaming in the 90s, it meant that we were left with lots of janky implementations and outdated graphics APIs that were quickly forgotten about. Though, MDK doesn't seem to suffer from this - it should be capable of running on newer systems directly [1]. One big issue it does have is that it uses a 16-bit installer, which is one thing that was explicitly retired during the transition to 64-bit due to it being so archaic at that moment, only being relevant to Windows 1-3. But you can still install the game using the method described in the article, and it should hopefully run fine from there on. Since it has options to use a software renderer and old DirectX, at least one of these should work.

[1] https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/MDK

[lossyalgo]

I use WinAmp 2.0 sometimes which was released in 1996. I prefer to use v5 but I like to show friends that such old software still works fine (even Shoutcast streaming works fine).

[jamespo]

Try running windows 11 on old CPUs, or machines without secure boot / TPM 2.0.

[hackyhacky]

> Try running windows 11 on old CPUs, or machines without secure boot / TPM 2.0.

The more relevant test is the reverse: running Windows XP and apps of that era on modern hardware. It will work perfectly. The same cannot be said of 2000-era Mac software.

[jamespo]

That's an academic use case rather than something a lot of people would like to do.

[lossyalgo]

That's because TPM 2.0 module allows M$ to uniquely identify you and sell your info to advertisers - it's not an actual technical limitation, it's just because M$ is greedy, and it's a shame they aren't punished by governments for creating all this unnecessary eWaste just to make even more cash.

[anthk]

With GNU/Linux and BSD I just recompile. I can run old C stuff from the 90's with few flags.

Under GNU/Linux, the VB6 counterpart would be TCL/Tk+SQlite, which would run nearly the same over almost 25-30 years.

As a plus, I can run my code with any editor and the TCL/Tk dependencies will straightly run on both XP, Mac, BSD and GNU/Linux with no propietary chains ever, or worse, that Visual Studio monstruosity. A simple editor will suffice and IronTCL weights less than 100MB and that even bundled with some tool, as BFG:

https://codeberg.org/luxferre/BFG

IronTCL:

https://www.irontcl.com/index.html

Good luck finding some VB5/6 runtime libraries out there without being a virii nest.

[pjmlp]

I suggest paying attention to some mac development podcasts.

[steve1977]

What would I learn there?

[pjmlp]

That development on macOS UI frameworks isn't as rosy.

[steve1977]

I'm not saying it's perfect. Just that it's less of a mess than the situation on Windows.

[pjmlp]

Again, listen to those podcasts, especially how Apple has (not) handled bug reports.

Between Carbon, Cocoa, UI Touch, UI Kit, Catalyst, Swift UI, there is plenty to chose from, with many non overlapping capabilities.

Then there is naturally the whole plethora of Kits, with several deprecated and replaced by others without feature parity,

https://marcoeidinger.github.io/appleframeworks/

[hackyhacky]

> Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK

I'm not going to descend into a "my OS's API is worse than yours" pissing match with you, because it's pointless and tangential. The issue is not "is the Windows framework situation worse than Linux" but rather "is the Windows framework situation worse than it used to be" and the answer is emphatically yes, and due mostly to Ballmer's obsession with chasing shiny things, such as that brief period when he decided that all Windows must look like a phone.

[hulitu]

> Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK,

Xlib and Motif are stable APIs. Qt and ... GTK on the other hand...