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I’ll say it once, I’ll say it forever: Windows has better backward compatibility, period. Even compared to linux. Rebuilding an old open source linux app to work on a modern distro can be done, but it’s a process that could take hours or days. And if you don’t have the source code you’re shit out of luck. Have fun getting that binary built against a 1 year old version of glibc to work. This, incidentally is what things like flatpak, docker and ubuntu’s nonsense competitor to both (of which our hatred is entirely rational no really stop laughing) are trying to solve.
Meanwhile microsoft office still handles leap years wrong because it might break backwards compatibility with old documents. Binaries built for windows xp will usually just work on windows 11. Packages built for ubuntu 22.0 often won’t run on ubuntu 23.0. You never notice this because linux are a culture of recompilers. Rebuilding every last package once a month is just how some distros roll. But that’s not backwards compatibility, that’s ongoing maintenance.
Windows 11 isn’t even backwards-compatible with 7-year-old CPUs! Run a 32-bit or 16-bit (dos) exe on Win11/x64? Think again. Windows drivers are always a pain in the butt. Load up an old driver for your favorite peripheral? Probably won’t work.
Ah yes, because linux drivers never break!
You might not understand the pain if you don’t own a tv tuner card but trust me, it’s ROUGH!
The old hauppage TV tuner cards work great with Linux. I actually have some old-school hauppage (old 4:3 TV signal) tuner cards and they work great under a modern Ubuntu install. I also use a couple of hdhomerun units (which do hd) and they don’t really require drivers and also work fantastically with Linux. With Linux the drivers are (mostly) part of the kernel. If they don’t work, it usually means that they’re very new. Linux driver support is leaps and bounds better than any windows support, which is usually discontinued and forgotten about.because the companies go out of business and have closed-source drivers. Linux drivers are open source and if they don’t work, the community fixes them even if the company goes under or hasn’t been around for decades.
But is that desirable? I’d rather break things in favor of something better, and provide a way to make the old thing run, than be stuck with ancient baggage
Also, while that’s true for software, compatibility for old hardware is horrible under Windows
I’d rather break things in favor of something better, and provide a way to make the old thing run, than be stuck with ancient baggage
Windows is office software first and foremost, designed to be used by people who neither know nor care what an “operating system” is. Every last one of these people is entirely incapacitated by even the most lovingly-crafted and descriptive error message. If Microsoft ever considered a policy like this, the city of Redmond would be razed to the ground inside twelve hours
Rebuilding the app for the newer version is an objectively better solution, because it allows you to take advantage to new features. 64-bit migrations are a game changer for example. But its an ungodly amount of effort. Every single sodding package has a person responsible for building it for every distro that supports it. Its only because its on the distros to make a given program work on their distro that the system works at all. I agree that I’d rather it be rebuilt to fit into the new system. But that’s a lot of work. Never forget that.
I think this is because Windows developers are bored to remove old code and as a result Windows 11 is an added layer on top of Windows 10, 8, 7 and even XP.
Backwards compatibility, but at what cost?
The stifling of innovation. So that’s more of a feature to microsoft
The vast majority of software run on Windows these days runs in a web browser. The legacy shit in windows doesn’t impact most software engineers
Or its an electron app.
One good thing (probably the only good thing) about electron is it makes it easy to port an app to linux.
runs in a web browser.
Or its an electron app.
Something something something history repeating
I heard this concept somewhere once of “Technical Debt” wherein a thing gets made and it works really well but then it gets updated or new features are added and something breaks, but rather than tear the whole thing apart to fix the issue, a patch or bandaid gets slapped on to ship the thing. Then the next update comes along and this time it takes two bandaids, one to ‘fix’ the new problem and one to keep the old bandaid on. The next update takes three bandaids, then four . . . and so on. The accumulation of all these bandaids is known as the Technical Debt, and it must always be repaid, somehow, someday.
Microsoft stubbornly refuses to repay their technical debt at all costs, Apple is terrified of letting anyone ever get even a glimpse of their mountain of technical debt, and Linux bathes in a weird soup of refusing to let technical debt even happen and dispensing bandaids so fast they make the RedCross look like a joke.
I prefer ongoing maintenance over backwards compatibility, I can easily run such old software in an emulator in recent hardware.
Installing old Linux applications IS a problem. They’re available only if someone repackaged them for newer distros. If not they can’t run anymore because of dependencies mismatch.
This is a good reason for static linking. All the dependencies are built into the binary, meaning it is more portable and future proof.
We don’t need flatpak for this!
And harder to fix vulnerabilities in a linked library, and more bloat in both storage space and memory used.
Trade-offs!
I’ll take a program that isn’t getting updates anymore or simply wasnt working in my modified environment using slightly more ram and storage over it not working at all.
I have firsthand experience with videogames made for one flavor of Linux not working on my machine due to dependency hell.
Flatpak time
Linux: I can’t stop you.
It could. It just doesn’t want to. Why would it? Its your computer.
If you want to delete / including the EFI partition turning your machine into a paperweight you should be allowed to do so.
I don’t want my mom to be able to turn her computer into a paperweight…
Don’t give her sudo permission then.
How she will install anything then
Just to be clear, the person answering Flatpaks isn’t being flippant. Any tools, editors or games that Mom wants, she can safely install by searching and clicking ‘intall’, all without enough permissions to harm her computer.
Linux, for less technical parents, is genuinely really nice, now.
Awesome
If you wanna put your qualitative hat on: how much better is today’s easiest distro than Mint was circa 2010?
The big thing that changed side 2010 is that most distros are perfectly usable on most hardware.
I keep tossing Linux onto random stupid hardware I have lying around, and lately it just goes spectacularly well.
I should be ashamed of even asking if Linux will run on it, but Linux ends up running well on it.
Around 2010, I used to tell people that if they did their research and used Mint, for simple web stuff, they’re going to be fine.
Lately I end up telling people “I don’t know how to do that advanced thing you’re debating which Windows product to pay for, because, of the last three random Linux distros I tried, all thee provided it for free and pre-configured with sensible defaults”.
I’m sure there’s still plenty of interesting reasons to need a paid operating system. But for the simple practical stuff, I find Linux so much easier, even on my random poorly researched distros and hardware combinations.
I might well have just had an incredibly lucky streak, of course.
Flatpaks
you can add
sudopermissions for individual users for certain commands only; and i recommend you would do that; i.e. give hersudopermission for installing/uninstalling applications, but nothing else.uninstalls the kernel package
It’s a good thing that new and unexperienced users who want to learn 😃 on the internet get recommendations such as “use
rm -fr /to remove the french language pack and fix your localization issues” and then ending up with an expensive, broken hardware (/s)
SELinux: I’m sorry Dave, we don’t do that here.
My favourite thing about updates on my work Mac is when you say ‘try in one hour’ thinking it’ll ask you then an hour later it aggressively closes your programs. I use Linux, Mac and Windows regularly and Mac has by far the worst update experience out of all of them imo.
I’ve clicked the “install updates tonight” button a bunch of times, it consistently fails to update and then I have to force it to update the next morning. Incredibly poor experience.
Every day, for weeks, my Apple Watch notifies me about available updates when I put it on after charging. Why didn’t you install the updates while you were charging, then?! It only stops when I put it back on the charger and manually tell it to update.
Major update? 1 hour. Minor update? 1 hour.
Someone clearly hasn’t heard of dependency hell.
I use NixOS so I obviously have not.
You can also remove the fr*nch language pack via
rm -fr /But in all seriosity, i tried to install Linux dual-boot with Windows on my dad’s computer last weekend, and it broke the windows install because it doesn’t support bitlocker (apparently). Maybe i could have gotten it to work, but i abandoned the project after the first failed attempt. Still a bit salty about that. Especially since it was meant to be a demonstration how “quick and easy” installing Linux nowadays supposedly is.
It is quick and easy. Maintaining any other OS side by side is always a bigger ordeal than not doing it. It breaks the other way around as well - If you were running some linux distro and then tried dual booting by installing windows - no way you’d be able to boot into linux without extra tweaking.
--non-pqréservéè-rootònnThe best way to dual boot windows and linux is with separate drives, not partitions imo.
You’re missing the last step, throw out the windows drive.
“I can’t delete bloatware” - all 3 of them
I would say you can on do that on Windows and Android, but it is not intended by the OS and you have to work around certain measures. Linux just lets you do everything, even if it is a really bad idea
All of them are pushing generative AI that many users don’t want and you have to manually opt out on Windows and Mac.
And you’ll often just be opted back in the next time there’s an update.
Removed by mod
nah windows will not let you disable things like windows defender and telemetry, even if you have windows enterprise edition. It might be possible to delete it some of the bloatware, but it’ll just reinstall itself in an update.
Tbf not letting the average windows user turn off windows defender is a good idea
Do android system apps count as bloatware? Cause on GrapheneOS you quite literally start out with the bare minimum on a fresh install.
I haven’t done too much in terms of messing around with system apps besides allowing/denying some permissions with Permission Manager X
GrapheneOS is not your typical android image … and that’s why its great!
have you like
ever actually tried installing an old app on linux
or accidentally had a power outage during an updateit literally can’t update without breaking and can’t install old apps lol
Can’t you just bury your head in the sand like the rest of us? Linux is literally perfect if you ignore all of its flaws.
Yeah I’ve installed heaps of old apps, it depends on dynamic vs static libraries etc but some people still use Emacs 25…
I have lost power whilst updating, can be a nuisance depending in the distro, but snapshots (zfs and btrfs both work well for me) have been life saving.
Mac and windows simply don’t have a lot of quality of life features. Working with them is painful. As self a documenting systems they are fantastic though, however, when I was younger we had things called schools that served to address that gap, these have fallen out of favour in modern times.
it depends on dynamic vs static libraries
why must the user think about this shit? i can grab a windows app made for XP and run it on 11, and it’ll run perfectly fine, and i don’t have to think about the way its dynamic loader figures it out
ill have lower chances of running an app made for RHEL8 on RHEL9 than that
Speaking of not being able to delete system apps, a friend of mine with a Pixel phone says Google Play cannot be uninstalled from it. Anybody know for sure?
You can via adb ( android debug bridge ) , no root needed, but you need a pc or shizuku. Although if he has a pixel device he should just install GrapheneOS imo. Edit: puxel -> pixel
I can’t remember the original version of the comic, what does each one of them say?
“I wish I wasn’t primarily bred to be food…”
So only the dog?
Duk. The ultimate, all-purpouse animal.
The ultimate life form.
The teeth on that bird are disturbing
Linux: i can’t stop dumb users (me) completely destroying everything with a bad console command
I did this. Luckily, nothing was lost because I was only using it to learn at the time. It oddly boosted my confidence because if I could break the OS, I could learn how to use it.
I much prefer that to Apple’s approach of “you probably didn’t want to do that, so you can’t”. I’ve literally had to boot into Linux to fix things on Macs. Fucking infuriating.
A great learning experience to not copy paste commands yoj don’t understand.
But that’s in my experience sadly very necessary especially in the beginning when you are getting into Linux. So getting into Linux has quite a steep learning curve because not knowing what you are copy pasting can have terrible consequences, but understanding everything before you copy paste is very demanding.
When out comes to my main rig, i never had the experience of everything just working out of the box. There was always something that required me searching for obscure fixes, hoping for the best.Very necessary
No it absolutely is not. When you’re looking up guides and come across an unfamiliar command, don’t copy and paste it and find out what it does. Google it. Man it. Research it. Stop copying and pasting commands you don’t understand.
My point is that if that is the case (and I do understand why) then i can’t possibly recommend Linux to people that don’t want their OS to be their hobby, because as for my experience they will come across something that needs some command line input.
I find it hilarious that the first architecture change in 10 years, that happened seven years ago, still causes anxiety and pain for people who don’t even use that operating system and probably never did.
I wonder how much Linux usership is owed to people being completely incapable of dealing with a minor inconvenience they once encountered (or only saw a meme about) on an apple product.
The sun puts out less energy than is wasted by people hating on Apple for completely and utterly irrational reasons.
An equal amount of wasted energy is output defending a trillion dollar corporation that doesn’t care about those defending them at all. Apple be fine. Let’s just use our computers and move on with our lives; it doesn’t have to be personal.
Defending the truth seems worthwhile to me. Even if for a mega corporation. There are valid criticisms to be used… but this is not one of them. We can do better!
I’m pretty sure the meme is factually correct: you can’t run 32 bit applications on current versions of macOS. Unless something has changed recently that I don’t know of. Doesn’t iOS also force updating apps? I have a vague memory of my partner not being able to use an “old” version of an app and also not being able to update it so they simply couldn’t use it. That could be on the app developer though. Both of those a relevant to “old apps”.
If the meme is referring only to arm64 then eh I guess it’s a bit of a stretch but whatever, it’s a meme.
I agree there are many more, and much more annoying, criticisms though.
Doesn’t iOS also force updating apps?
I haven’t used iOS in 10 years, but I do recall that even on older Android devices, Netflix wants you to keep closer to the current version (oddly enough, even for a 1st or 2nd gen Chromecast?). So I think not technically, although I don’t know the current status, but even so, yeah, but same as Android too. Ofc, at some point the device gets so old that Apple won’t let you update it any longer, so that’s one way to get it to stop updating:-P.
In researching this a bit more, I confirm that 64-bit Mac not running 32-bit programs is a valid criticism. However, my original point stands: what Linux system can also allow you to do similarly? Especially across a different chip set - like why expect a 64-bit Mac M-something to run a 32-bit game compiled for Windows using a x86 architecture, without needing to install something else to specifically handle that transition? Here is an example of someone doing the same with Ubuntu, needing to first install multiple libraries before it will “just work”.
Even so, there are multiple ways to make this procedure work on a Mac. Other than dual booting with an older copy of a 32-bit OS, emulators can work at near native speeds. Granted, it’s not as convenient as Wine (I would guess?), and won’t be until someone puts in the effort to make a 64-bit version of Wine (which does exist) that will natively support 32-bit programs, again compiled for a different OS (Windows) and chip architecture (x86). It only won’t work until… you know, it does.
Which it already does, using the likes of either Parallels or VMWare Fusion, which yeah requires the complexity of downloading an additional program and setting up a VM environment.
On the other hand, notice how according to this meme, there are zero problems with Linux, like EVER. In comparison, having to download an extra program, due to an event that happened all of once in the last 20 years of computing, and even that was 6 years ago now… apparently that’s “too much work”? How did this meme creator (which seems not OP according to other comments here) figure out how to join a Lemmy - wouldn’t having to pick an instance first likewise be too much to handle?! 😜
I kid, but this kind of tribal thinking (“in-group good, out-group bad”) doesn’t help anything, imho.
Hmm the type of thinking that implies Linux users only say bad things about Apple because they don’t know what they’re talking about? :)
You can 100% run 32 bit binaries on Linux systems so the answer is all of them. The need for libraries isn’t the same as the complete inability to do so, any program with dependencies of course needs them and they of course have to be compatible. Hell with
binfmt_miscyou can even run arm32/aarch64 binaries, but that’s not fair I guess since it’ll be transparent qemu emulation, although still pretty cool.Also my view of this meme isn’t that it’s implying that there are no issues, just that it doesn’t force things on you or stop you from doing things which is generally true.
Based on some of their arguments it feels like they’ve never actually used a Mac. “It’s for babies and old people” they cry, like there’s not an entire Unix system under the hood.
That’s like saying there is an entire Linux system under Android. Sure there is, but there is enough in the way to
make the kernel not really accessiblenot have access to many normal Linux functions (like ifconfig).Are Linux users really working in the kernel all that much? I’ve been doing support for Linux sysadmins for a decade and not once have I needed to touch the kernel.
I mis-phrased that, sorry. In the Android case, you can’t access a lot of networking functionality and other lower level access functions.
Running ifconfig responses with:
Warning: cannot open /proc/net/dev (Permission denied). Limited output.
Even though it is based on Linux, and has access to the ifconfig app, it’s not really something you can do. There are other things to consider like that. While you could try to give yourself root access, it’s messy and not something that’s really easy or encouraged.
In macOS’s case, it’s Unix to a point, but try installing NVIDIA cards in them (for CUDA cores). There are Unix drivers for Nvidia cards, for x86 and ARM, but even thought it’s Unix, it still won’t work.
How about running native Vulcan? It’s a major API for 3D graphics. It has a Unix driver, but still can’t work on macOS. Best that can be done is workarounds, but that’s not native and has issues.
There is Unix support for these, but macOS isn’t really Unix underneath.
It’s probably more likely that they just needed to find something bad to say about Macs, and were too lazy to find one of the actual legitimate reasons (like it being closed source or something? probably bc the one used “sounds better”, to someone who can’t recognize that it is gaslighting).
The amount of purity whinging in Linux communities generally makes me sorry whenever I respond to one of these posts. On the other hand, I am not smart so here goes once more into the fray… 🤪
I just don’t get this delusion that “closed source” = evil.
Then again, I never “got” fanatical movements or beliefs.
I never “got” fanatical movements or beliefs.
Said the guy defending Apple on Lemmy. Oh, boy.
Do you often hallucinate things I never said? What am I not saying now?
I’m sure in your head that was a great comeback. Good job, champ.
Android hate not tolerated. Android can delete system apps, if you aee root. On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root
Considering how difficult it still can be to get root on Android, I understand the shade, though.
On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root
Wrong. You can install Flatpak apps as a user, which are very similar to apps on Android.
