Notices by Martin Atkins (apparentlymart@mastodon.online)

@alcinnz @davidgerard of course people not engaging when they are happy is also one of the classic problems of gathering actionable feedback in open source.

Several times I've fallen into the trap of biasing the wants of a loud minority over a status quo that a larger group was happy with. Of course I heard from the formerly-happy people after they were no longer happy but it was too late to revert.

I don't want telemetry either but this is one way it can help.

@byterhymer @RL_Dane @alcinnz indeed, the architecture is not young but the combination of macOS and ARM is, and it is that pairing I was referring to.

Open source software written for MacOS on x86_64 is typically relatively easy to port as long as it's written portably, but proprietary software is not so easy.

My general point though: making old software run on new platforms isn't necessarily free. And keeping old platforms working isn't free either.

@RL_Dane @alcinnz meanwhile the retro computing hobbiest community is making heroic efforts to do things that most computer users would find pointless, like rebuilding an Amiga in an FPGA. I love that this stuff exists, but it does also demonstrate that keeping old stuff running is _real work_, and somebody has to care enough to do it.

@RL_Dane @alcinnz for example, people want to run software on macOS running on Apple Silicon, and that platform is very young.

Most software in the world was not designed with that platform in mind. If you want to use Apple Silicon then you probably need to use new software.

If you want to run old software then you ideally need an old OS running on an old CPU architecture. But in practice that's not what most people seem to want.

@RL_Dane @alcinnz as long as old versions of all involved software remain available, you can keep your stability by running those. And in open source it's far more likely that older versions will be available.

In my experience the big trouble starts when people want to mix and match new and old. Everything is either explicitly or implicitly designed for the environment that exists at the time it was created, and we cannot predict the future.