The_Decryptor

Tons of software meant to run on 32-bit hasn’t been updated to run on 64-bit natively.

32bit only Linux apps are basically non-existent, anything with the source available and maintainers would have been ported at some point in the last 2 decades, otherwise they have very specific technical reasons for being 32bit only (like OBS iiuc), the source has been lost somehow, or it’s a proprietary program where the company has no interest (e.g. Valve with Steam)

In fact I think Steam might really be it.

Or Automattic doesn’t have enough employees left to implement it

For a community called “technology” there’s a pretty strong anti-AI bubble going on here.

Are you surprised people have opinions about technology, in a community dedicated to discussing technology?

If everyone has moved on from 32bit, and the old stuff doesn’t change, where is the maintenance requirement?

The problem is that it’s not old unchanging code, people want the latest supported version so they can still run their 32-bit binaries with the latest supporting libraries.

And if the upstream developers don’t consider 32-bit support important, then it falls on the distro maintainers to patch the code to keep it running in these situations.

Use Zola or Hugo then

I always thought it was purely a hardware limitation, but reading up on it I found it’s actually just “virtual 8086 mode” that was dropped, 16-bit protected mode is still available even when running the CPU in “long mode”.

So it rules out DOS apps, but 16bit Win 3.x apps should still run. But it’s probably a compatibility minefield, and even MS decided it wasn’t important (iirc the only thing they kept around was support for 16-bit app installers, but by internally swapping them out with 32-bit versions when run, since it was apparently common for 32-bit 9x apps to still use 16-bit installers so they could show a proper error message when run under Win 3.x)

It seems to me that 16-bit applications are already basically broken with 32-bit wine if you’re running a 64-bit kernel, by default it places extra restrictions over what the hardware already does to prevent apps from loading 16-bit code entirely.

https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/FAQ#16-bit-applications-fail-to-start

Guessing that’s why they don’t feel it’s that important to continue supporting, seems a VM is the future for these apps.

WINE’s WoW64, does not work for all games.

Ok but is that because of fundamental limitations, or just because of bugs?

One’s easier to fix than the other.

Yeah this is a perfect use case for torrents, could go a step further and keep track of a downloader’s ratio to stop people leaching.

deleted by creator

Tizen (resting place of Meego)

I’d say SailfishOS is the final resting place of MeeGo, especially since it’s maintained by ex-Nokia devs.

That’s only if you’re running an x86 container right? It should be native with an ARM64 one.

Also, compared to something like the Switch? I don’t see MS remotely bricking these devices if you run “homebrew” on them.

Socialism is when you want speed limits

And there’s still web directories hanging around, similar to the now dead dmoz site.

https://url.town/ and https://curlie.org/ for example

True, that’d definitely make it a lot more viable to hold corporations to account.

It’s an easy license to reason about, allows for basically any project to use it, and you don’t need to worry about trying to enforce it (Because the GPL is only as good as your lawyers are)

Plan 9 is inspired by UNIX (Helps that it had the same devs), but it’s not a direct continuation.

UnixWare is I think the only direct continuation of the original AT&T UNIX. The various BSDs are close enough but were re-written entirely in the late 80s/early 90s so there’s nothing original remaining.

Should be possible, as it’s a normal VM you can already install flatpak apps in said VM as normal, you’d just need a Windows side bit to invoke the install within WSL when you opened the flatpak bundle, and then something to add a start menu shortcut from the app inside the VM (Which I actually assume already exists, I never actually ran WSL2 when I was on Windows)

Why have a laptop or a dual boot with Linux when you can now more easily stay on the proprietary OS ?

This is called market retention.

Preventing migration to another OS, another software ecosystem.

The ‘Embrace’ and ‘Extend’ parts of EEE.

That’s stretching the definition to the point it’s nearly unrecognisable.

What the term meant was for things like Internet Explorer, where MS adopted an existing standard (Embrace), started changing it in incompatible ways (Extend), while using their market power to lock out competitors (Extinguish)

e.g. IE used an incompatible method for sizing and laying out elements than any other browser, so a site that laid out properly in NN4 looked broken in IE6, and vise versa. So most devs targeted IE6 as it was more popular, and NN4 users got more and more broken sites.

ACPI was similar, Windows had an extremely lax implementation of it, so motherboards often shipped with bugs that Windows would ignore but would stop anything else from booting. Intentional? Doesn’t really matter, since it sure was helpful in slowing the adoption of things like Linux, that had to come up with workarounds for all the broken hardware.