alt Hacker News"Dropping support for things just because they are old" is typical commercial software behavior. I can run the latest Linux kernel and still have access to an internal floppy disk drive if I wanted to, yet billion dollar companies can't seem to manage to support 10 year old stuff.
I still am sore from when I "upgraded" macOS and suddenly support for my 1080i TV was gone. Yesterday it worked fine, today it's gone. All because they can't be bothered to maintain a code path.
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Ironic, considering Linux is dropping a LOT of old devices from 7.1
Just this week we've seen Linux talking about dropping support for some older hardware precisely because attacks against it were becoming easier with LLMs.
Ok what do you suggest? Every feature ever written should be supported in perpetuity even if 3 people are using it? Clearly you didn't think this through. Should 2026 computers have a ISA interface as well?
Supporting old hardware and software has a substantial cost that only grows exponentially. Companies exist to print money, not to cater to the smallest niches.
It would be great if they could support things, but I most definitely understand why they don't.
And soon I won't be able to run old 32bit binaries with the latest Linux Kernel. We all move on.
> "Dropping support for things just because they are old" is typical commercial software behavior.
You are deluding yourself if you think open source folks are better. You can't compile and run a modern version of GCC on Solaris 10 on SPARC, for example. And we just had a story here last week about removal of bus mouse support. It's only a mild exaggeration to say that lots of folks will check the commit activity on github and of a project doesn't have commits this week it should be banned from the internet and the universe.
Then you have the problem that many dev tools are not forward compatible. CMake is a huge issue. An ubuntu system from 2020 has CMake on it, but it won't compile anything that uses CMake that was released in recent years because the cmakefiles are incompatible.
The economics make the reasoning obvious, though.
With closed source IP, every bit of support, from bug fixes, to feature requests, to compatibility fixes to integrate with newer mainline/foundational tooling, costs money.
With open source projects (and in particular ones like Linux where there's a huge number of contributors and interested parties), support for would-be niche facilities can keep going as long as there's someone with the knowledge and spare time to do it.