4 ms·

No, he’s asking what you think a reasonable support timeline is. An open source project supporting hardware 6 years old is pretty awesome.

• yjftsjthsd-h 19d ago
  NixOS is an open source project that runs great on my 2013 Dell laptop. I think the real point of distinction is that brew depends on Apple's OS and SDK, which somewhat ties their hands, while other OSs don't.
• ryandrake 19d ago
  6 years is really not a long time at all. You can probably find heaps of open source software out there that compiles and runs perfectly on 20 year old PCs. It's not like the maintainer has to do much to retain support--they just have to not make the software dependent on new operating systems. Bits don't rot.
  • richwater 19d ago
    How many of those 20 year old projects had to go through an architecture change that the manufacturer no longs supports? Come on man be reasonable.
    • ryandrake 19d ago
      Homebrew doesn't have to lift a finger to support Intel Macs. It already does! All they have to do is not kill support for them. Hey, it's their software, they are all volunteers and can do whatever they want. I'm grateful for the short window of time in which I was able to use their software. I don't get to decide their support period, but I will still hopelessly complain about it. "Deliberately breaking compatibility with a computer because it is old" is my biggest axe to grind with the whole software industry, and I'll shake my fists at this cloud until I die.
      • yladiz 19d ago
        Software maintenance is not free, especially for a project the size of Homebrew, and it's perfectly reasonable for software to not be supported on older computers due to maintenance burden, with a good example being 32 bit processors. If you had a 32 bit processor would you expect all of your software that was supported now to be supported forever, just because it supports it now?
        • ryandrake 19d ago
          I would not expect the software to continue to get updates, but I would expect the software to continue to work. I'm salty today because I tried to run Fusion 360, and found that Autodesk just out of the blue decided that 1. My computer is too old to run the software (which ran just fine a few weeks ago on the same computer); 2. That I needed to update the software, and 3. The update will not run on my "old" computer. They took software that ran fine on my computer and deliberately pulled the rug out. Fuck Autodesk. I'm spending the entire afternoon exporting dozens of files I have on their cloud, one at a time, since they apparently can't even manage to keep an existing version of the software running.
        • vor_ 19d ago
          How does MacPorts manage to do it?
          • threecheese 19d ago
            Why don't you ask them?
    • vor_ 19d ago
      Ask MacPorts, which goes all the way back to Leopard-era PowerPC!
  • nebezb 19d ago
    Bits certainly don’t rot and you’re welcome to stay on the latest stable version that runs on your architecture. And if you want new bits with the new features, those aren’t the same bits and that work isn’t free.
    • ryandrake 18d ago
      Exactly. That's all I'm asking for. If version X works on my system today and version Y needs an OS bump, well... that sucks and is avoidable, but whatever. I expect to be able to obtain and use version X tomorrow and into the future. That's it. I'm not asking to make version Y work for me, but it would be nice if they didn't add the OS dependency. But increasingly, developers can't even manage to keep version X around and working, despite them having to simply not do anything to it to keep it from breaking.
• hn_throw2025 18d ago
  I managed to sell my battered old 32-bit Thinkpad on eBay last year. I couldn’t put Trixie on it, but Bookworm installed fine.