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points by trollbridge 2 days ago | 0 comments
Does “support” really matter? My 2020 iMac still performs great, although I use Sequoia on it instead of Tahoe. It also runs Windows or Linux very well and was easy to upgrade to 128GB RAM.

My 2015 iMac is 11 years old and still works fine - I use it to run Windows 10 for the occasional thing that needs that and to test builds of software in High Sierra. It also runs Linux great.

[–] Andrew_nenakhov 2 days ago
It does, because everyone and their dog started releasing software that only runs on the latest version of macos. So if you are not running the latest macos, you can't use the latest software version.

For example, I used Sketch on my ond mac once and was quite happy, but then they dropped support for the OS version that mac was stuck upon. And since newer libraries resources etc all target latest version of Sketch, the version of Sketch I could run quickly became useless.

[–] GloriousKoji 2 days ago
The worst is when an application updates itself just so it can stop running and tell you to upgrade to the latest OS version.
[–] abletonlive 2 days ago
Hyperbole. Almost no software on macOS requires the latest.

However, it's great that developers are not too concerned with backwards compatibility. It was really holding back a lot of software

[–] Andrew_nenakhov 1 day ago
I told you a true story about my experience and you call it 'hyperbole'. Well, ok if it suits you.

On your second point, proper developers release security updates and backports for software released decades ago, while others always chase new shiny things and contribute a lot to this unsupportable legacy hell that we have to deal with.

[–] abletonlive 1 day ago
> I told you a true story about my experience and you call it 'hyperbole'. Well, ok if it suits you.

It's almost as if your anecdote isn't reality or truth.

[–] 3form 2 days ago
The difference being that the M-series machines do not have good prospects in terms of running Linux well. As I would personally not want to run Windows for sure, this matters a lot.
[–] odo1242 2 days ago
It has better prospects of being able to run Linux than it does of being able to run Windows, to be fair
[–] pishpash 2 days ago
Why would that be? You're stuck on drivers either way and ARM Windows runs just fine virtualized.
[–] odo1242 2 days ago
Asahi Linux exists for ARM Linux and has Windows has no equivalent (since it’s closed source and Microsoft doesn’t want to support that). Linux also runs virtualized, that’s obviously irrelevant because daily driving a VM isn’t a great idea.
[–] Telemakhos 1 day ago
Why isn’t daily driving a VM a good idea? Doesn’t Windows have a hypervisor now? Doesn’t Linux have KVM? It seems like modern OS design borrows a lot from the idea of virtual machines. Why not just go all the way?
[–] odo1242 1 day ago
- You have to run both the host OS and guest OS, losing you about 4-6GB of RAM and ~10% of CPU (and ~20-40 gigabytes of disk space)

- It’s slower

- GPU support in VMs is weird, especially when the host and guest use different graphics stacks (i.e. Windows games often don’t work in a Windows VM running on macOS because while the CPU can be passed through to the VM directly the GPU cannot; the VM driver has to try to translate DirectX GPU commands to Metal or OpenGL; some games can be a worse experience than using Wine)

There are systems with lightweight hypervisors for security purposes (like Android or PlayStation or even Windows sometimes), but those are (a) lightweight and built to use little resources, and (b) specifically designed to support the system APIs needed / use the same stack as the OS, so they won’t have the issues mentioned above.

Stuff like Qubes is also fine because you explicitly accept the tradeoffs when using it (that’s why Qubes has such high system requirements). And the VMs are all Linux-on-Linux, so the GPU issue is minimized.

While modern systems take inspiration from VMs, the sandboxing that most modern OSes do is designed to be much more lightweight than virtualization, since it doesn’t require virtualizing any hardware.

[–] trollbridge 2 days ago
Old M series runs Linux well.
[–] internet2000 2 days ago
It matters because AI is finding more security vulnerabilities than ever.
[–] xandrius 2 days ago
Trying using a Mac on which you cannot install latest Firefox and see how your statement holds.

That's one thing Windows is generally much better at.

[–] trollbridge 2 days ago
Firefox runs fine on High Sierra.
[–] xandrius 1 day ago
And before then?
[–] usern20260720 2 days ago
I was happy but all of a sudden my VPN refuses to release versions for Sonoma