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Comment by diath | Hacker News Reader

How would an open operating system fix a bug caused by sloppy game developers? I don't think anyone would think "let's not optimize the (equivalent of) critical sections in our operating system so that we don't break GTA", unless you're suggesting providing 100s of different implementations of different parts of the operating system that people can choose from to run a specific game, which I don't think is viable either. Patching individual games is far easier and is actually viable, which is precisely what GOG (Good Old Games) successfully does on a significantly large scale.

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If anything, what Microsoft was way, way better at was finding and working around these types of problems in the OS. Many developers have a more idealistic and less pragmatic approach instead of empathizing with their users: "it's the program's fault, why should we deal with it?"

> Many developers have a more idealistic and less pragmatic approach instead of empathizing with their users: "it's the program's fault, why should we deal with it?"

In the retro-games emulation scene there exist quite some people who write binary patches for popular retro games to fix such bugs. Perhaps this approach (and the necessary skills for it) should become more popular outside the retro-games emulation scene.

My sister who was at the time a professor had just moved to a Mac. There was some major statistics app that broke on an OS Update. She contacted the stats company and they said that Apple broke them. She contacted Apple and they said the stats company was given notice and access to beta builds. She was just stuck for months with it not working - and eventually loved back to Windows. She says it’s ugly, but it works.

Apple was always like that.

"Once upon a time, pointers on the Macintosh had 24 bits..."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632615

Though at least back then, they provided backward-compatibility modes for old software. You know, back when the expected service lifetime of your Mac was longer than that of your dog.

> unless you're suggesting providing 100s of different implementations of different parts of the operating system that people can choose from to run a specific game

You just invented "run in compatibility mode"

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