One-time purchase software would become dramatically more sustainable if platform churn could be ground to a halt. Most types of software achieved peak usability and functionality somewhere between 5 and 25 years ago and there wouldn't be much reason for anybody to upgrade if their one-time purchases continued to work in perpetuity. A substantial number even prefer e.g. Word 2000 or Photoshop CS1 over their modern incarnations but can't use those for either technical or legal reasons.

Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions.

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billforsternz 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe we should just freeze development in lots of designated areas and declare victory (I know this isn't a practical suggestion, but still...).

Eg in desktop OS's. Apple for example makes everyone miserable by re-breaking macOS every year. To what point?

	▲	paulryanrogers 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Apple certainly churns APIs quite often. And now my Tahoe install has broken window management, one of the most core features of a modern OS

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zahlman 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions.

... Even for desktop Linux users? I can't say I've felt it. I switched almost 4 years ago and it just keeps feeling better and better (in a "Luigi wins by doing nothing" kind of way).

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cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Linux desktops (not the kernel) are actually among the worst when it comes to platform churn. It's one of the reasons why Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, etc require relatively complex machinery and runtimes and whatnot to function. The churn is just masked by package managers.

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zahlman an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It's come across to me so far that this just results from application developers targeting a specific DE and not really thinking about compatibility, or even really whether they need specific functionality provided a specific way.

Would be nice to see the XDG stuff like portals etc. better respected, though, yeah.

	▲	cosmic_cheese 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		DE stuff is part of the picture, but there’s churn outside of those too. glibc, which is used in practically everything, is the classic example but across the whole of the Linux desktop sphere, it’s unusual for libraries to maintain compatibility. The only reason why Linux desktops work at all is thanks to package managers and their maintainers doing the heavy lifting of keeping applications and the libraries they use in lockstep. If it weren’t for that random programs would be breaking every other update.

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fragmede 23 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

if snaps were masked by apt, there wouldn't be such an objection to them.