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Comment by nothis | Hacker News Reader

For a while, now, I get these warnings that 32bit programs will soon be unsupported in macOS. Is this the release where they drop support?

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Yes.

https://medium.com/@hammen/significant-changes-in-macos-10-1...

11. As expected and previously announced, support for 32-bit processes/i386 architectures has been removed.

Printer drivers are also deprecated in Catalina. A future version of macOS will remove support for them completely.

24. “lpadmin: Printer drivers are deprecated and will stop working in a future version of CUPS”. man lpadmin on a macOS Catalina system for more details. It seems that Apple wants admins to move from lpd/smb/socket (JetDirect) to AirPrint.

Printers supporting AirPrint: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201311 (it is a loooong list, basically any printer designed since 2010).

I would assume that there would be a lot of professional printers that don’t support AirPrint.

I have an old-ish laser printer (purchased in 2005 or so) which works fine, I really don't want to replace it because of an OS upgrade. My dad's got an even older laser printer (purchased probably in the early 1990s) which also works fine, I don't think he's going to want to replace it either.

Hopefully by "printer drivers" they mean "printer manufacturer supplied drivers" and not "all drivers that aren't AirPrint". My printer uses a driver that's built in to MacOS, hopefully it can continue to do so.

If it does get dropped you may want to look into getting a raspberry pi. I have a couple of old JetDirect printers, and a plotter, that continue to work. I added AirPrint functionality so I could send documents from my iPhone. It's been far more useful than that.

This is something I've briefly looked into and forgotten about a number of times over the years (mainly so I can print from my iPad). I even have unused Raspberry Pis that are ready to be put into service for this.

I’ve had to run a Windows vm because a not-so-old but not widely released canon laser printer just won’t work under cups. It’s a pain but hey, still works.

No the printer driver problem is that printer manufacturers insist on using proprietary formats to communicate with their printer.

They invariably and up doing terrible things (why does a printer driver ever need a kext).

What they are saying is “your printer better support generic content formats” - AirPrint already forces that concept

What's the situation with gaming/Steam? Is this going to be another situation like Ubuntu's where thousands of legacy applications just get dropped? How will Wine function on 32-bit?

Apple is killing a lot of old games with this release.

Steam app itself is 64-bit since last year. The situation is, if you want to be able to continue playing all of your old games, you better keep an installation of macOS Mojave to dual boot into. Publishers also remove 32-bit games from sale on steam, eg Aspyr and Feral Interactive. "The complete list of 32-bit Mac games no longer supported" https://www.macgamerhq.com/news/32-bit-mac-games/

This is awful. Apple's making their OS _objectively_ worse for nothing but bizarre 64-bit purity.

Yes there is a reason - any code that you can get rid of makes maintenance easier, reduces the surface area of security vulnerabilities, and makes it easier to do updates. At what point should Apple support backwards compatibility? PPC code? 68K code? Carbon?

This isn’t just theoretical. The first widespread security vulnerability that I remember in Windows where you could easily run command line programs on a remote server just by changing the character encoding was caused by Microsoft not testing one of the seven or eight methods they had for defining a string.

You can read Raymond Chen’s Microsoft blog to get a first hand account of all the hacks they had to put in Windows to support backwards compatibility.

On another note, if rumors are to be believe that they are moving Macs over to ARM, they have to get rid of 32 bit code. Apple’s ARM chips got rid of the 32 bit ISA.

Steam breaks in Catalina because of the 32-bit issue. Online forums say uninstalling/reinstalling solves the problem.

Legacy video codecs are also removed. https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT209029

I about to post a reply complaining about this, but then I looked at the list. Were any of these formats previously supported by modern QuickTime? I know DivX, for example, was unsupported even as far back as Snow Leopard (unless Perian was installed).

Is this referring to QuickTime 7, the separate download?

Yes:

> These incompatible media files were typically created using formats or codecs that rely on QuickTime 7—an older version of QuickTime that is included in macOS Mojave for compatibility purposes. However, because versions of macOS after macOS Mojave will no longer include the QuickTime 7 framework, you’ll first need to detect and convert incompatible media files to continue to use those files in iMovie.

I'm actually kinda excited by them dropping 32-bit support. There are so many awful applications I've had to use for work, like VPNs or a print application or license server, that just suck battery life, force-open themselves at login with no way to disable, aren't optimized for retina, crash all the time, etc, and they haven't been maintained in years since they still "work". But this will force some maintenance to happen. I realize they could still suck on 64-bit but at least they'll have to be looked at again.

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