However, Some fields still have some 32-bit based products (or frameworks) which would break on Catalina.
Why would someone use 32bit? There are closed-sourced products that never released as 64bit. for software developers that's quite rate but still for some fields there are no real alternatives for those products. so they should keep older versions or run VM.
Yep. I have a number of 32-bit programs that were never and will never be ported to 64 bits because the author has died, the company is out of business, or other reasons.
Now I will have to buy replacements for these programs just so I can run an OS that gets the latest security updates.
It can also affect hardware.
For example, I have two Apple AirMac routers that can only be configured with a version of Airport Utility that runs on old hardware. I'm lucky to have an old iLamp around that I can use when this is necessary, but when that dies, I have to throw away two perfectly good routers just because Apple chooses not to support them in the current version of Airport Utility.
Perhpas now they will have that, or other pieces of software will come and fill the void.
I'm still pretty bummed about what this will mean for WINE though, it will mean a lot more work for those devs – or a serious reduction in the amount of software that will work with it.
why? all Intel chips currently supports 32bit ISA. You can still have VMs to run 32bit. also IIRC, Wine is X-Window? so you can even attach through SSH-X to it with simple Docker container.
Absolutely true. I once had to set a client-server Windows-based CRM in a small company. The server had a native Linux version, the client app was windows-only. Client machines ran Windows. Users also wanted to work from home. For some reason (some kind of connection glitches or whatever, I can't remember already) I've chosen to install Xfree on the Ubuntu server (one of command-line-managed VirtualBox VMs on another Ubuntu server actually), set-up the app for direct client-server connection, let users connect to the Linux box over OpenVPN and run the Win32 app with Wine over SSH on their Windows machines :-)
I've fell in love with the X as I have managed to set this up (quite easily, BTW). I certainly don't want Linux to loose such a beautiful ability as it switches to Wayland (I don't worry much about Wine though, all the distributions but Ubuntu keep shipping multiarch libs and it works just fine but I won't update my Mac as it has just 128 GiBs SSD and I have no disk space to spare for a Windows VM).
More people have to suffer usually if software ends up long lived without being pushed to upgrade when there are newer technologies that improve the experience - it's a heavy price of others you're asking for a lot of times when choices have to be made between compatibility and improvements that often get discounted unreasonably.
I look at all of the Mac software I've lost and will lose to upgrades over the years, including the offline-only parts of my workflow that held back only myself, and weigh them against this bright new future of low-effort blown-up tablet apps on my desktop that they were sacrificed for. A heavy price certainly has been paid here.
Real world is not the web cocoon, even there, switching front-end every 2 years is not acceptable.
disclamer: I know that for a fact as I'm in the process of replacing a CNC control system with modern parts, trust me it's HARD.
It's crazy that we can't run old software on vastly more powerful hardware. Imagine if we suddenly couldn't read old books.
Computers are made up of many small parts the same with software, every component comes from different vendors and they are all working asynchrously to each other and adjusting to the changes around them every time they update or make a new component.
Each new change looks like a tiny leap-frogging, but if you don't update or rearchitechture for a long while it becomes an insurmountable to task to update because the whole world has moved away from under you. Not by monumental breaking changes but by thousands small changes that has added up.