Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come
theregister.com
theregister.com
We all have a 2000's supercomputer equivalent in our pocket but still can't type faster than 60wpm.
The first car to reach 100kmh did it in 1899 but we're still driving at that speed on many highways around the world (+-20%) because us humans can't react quickly enough to drive it safely above that speed.
I was promised a flying DeLorean when I was a kid, I'm starting to think that won't be the case before I'm older than Old Biff Tannen.
But that in 30 years of computer history where advancements are literally exponential and all we have to show since NT is Windows 11!?
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Also, Windows insists on being backward compatible.
It is therefore doomed to mediocrity.
Because it's holding us back, very very badly.
When I swear at my computers, which I do quite a lot, I want them to know what it means and to pay attention.
Apple seems happy to throw everything out and start over every few years. I would say they've conditioned the Apple fanbase to always want changes, even if they're not to the benefit of end users. I'm not sure how older software fare on macOS but when I used macOS for ~10 yrs... it was always something new that everyone should be using. Or use the software that is packaged with the OS. The push is stronger every year to move to iCloud or some sort of managed platform, which means an ever-increasing amount of lock-in.
On the Linux side of the house, you're bound to run into lib incompatibilities. There's ever an ongoing churn of breaking changes on Linux. So, unless someone has been maintaining packages for your specific distribution, you might be out of luck unless you're technically inclined.
On mobile OSes, you fare even worse. Running older software is a herculean task on that front. Then there's the never ending cycle of in-app purchases and subscriptions you have to tangle with.
Being on Windows, for all of its warts, is a much-needed departure from the above. I can still run games I played back in 1997 as well as most software from that time. With WSL2, you get the added benefit of running a Linux environment alongside your Windows one now.
(Typing this on my 1st gen iPhone SE. A wonderful phone, but I’ll probably have to stop using that soon as well, for similar reasons)
I think you misunderstand me, in multiple ways.
1. I'm typing on a Mac. It's an i7 with Monterey. I have been using Macs since System 6 on a 68000 in 1988.
2. Mac OS X is a UNIX. Not a figure of speech: it is registered and conformant.
https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/apple.htm
As such, Mac OS X contains software baggage that is over a decade older than Classic MacOS, released 1984.
It keeps more than you'd think.
3. Linux keeps more than you'd think, too. I can and do run WordPerfect 8 for Linux on Ubuntu 22.04, alongside MS Word 2003.
I wrote about how to get it:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/20/wordperfect_for_unix_...
4. On my Win11 box, I have Freecell Solitaire extracted from Win32S for Windows 3.1, released 30Y ago.
I don't need this level of continuity. I enjoy it. I still have machines that can boot into DOS and I have DOS apps I still use. But that is also fine in a VM.
But 30 years after NT, 54 years after Unix, I want all that legacy stuff gone.
I want legacy nonsense like "disk drives" and "files" gone.
I want an OS and apps in a type-safe native language, not some BS memory-managed VM. I have multicore 64-bit machines with gigs of RAM and these days I could fit terabytes of nonvolatile memory straight onto their memory bus. I want a transparent object store in persistent memory, like a modern multitasking Apple Newton that can handle live video and surround audio, that understands my voice and my tone and my gaze and can read my intentions and show me the results in VR.
I gave a FOSDEM talk about this. You might enjoy it.
https://archive.fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/new_type_of_c...
The first half of your post is kind of irrelevant.
As to the latter half of your post, just use iOS. I think that fits the bill - dump the rest, see how it works out for you. Stop using legacy software and move on.
Never mind. I am not here to tell anyone off or complain or anything.
But BTW, I dislike iOS and dislike it more with each successive version, and it's even more burdened down with irrelevant legacy junk than any desktop OS.
Think we came pretty far actually.