Hughes: GNOME Software overall plan [LWN.net]

Hughes: GNOME Software overall plan

Posted Mar 18, 2013 18:35 UTC (Mon) by oblio (guest, #33465)
In reply to: Hughes: GNOME Software overall plan by hummassa
Parent article: Hughes: GNOME Software overall plan

Why upgrade the OS? On Windows you barely need OS upgrades, maybe one every 5-7 years. The OS itself is supported by Microsoft and all important applications still support old Windows versions. Firefox only recently dropped Windows 2000 support (13 year old OS).

On Windows you just upgrade the applications. A much lower risk of hosing the system than upgrading absolutely everything...

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Hughes: GNOME Software overall plan

Posted Mar 18, 2013 20:45 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

if you only upgrade windows every 5-7 years you will have been taken over by attackers in the meantime.

It's just that microsoft labels the updates differently (ever hear of 'hostfixes' and 'service packs', those are OS upgrades, frequently ones that break your software)

Hughes: GNOME Software overall plan

Posted Mar 18, 2013 21:57 UTC (Mon) by oblio (guest, #33465) [Link]

Service Packs can break software. Hot fixes rarely break any software. In my experience I know only of 2 cases where that happened: the Vsphere client and a custom IIS application. And that's out of hundreds of applications and hundreds of patches.

Meanwhile, please compare the version bumps between 3 different Fedora versions or 3 different Ubuntu versions. Those include tons of bug fixes and tons of new "features". Features I might want or not, features that might change something I do not changed.

Meanwhile, except for service packs, Windows versions do not introduce new functionality during hotfixes. And even base versions are supported for a long time, so you can just apply the hotfixes and ignore the service packs.

From a compatibility point of view, Windows rules supreme. I don't know any desktop OS with this kind of application compatibility.

Hughes: GNOME Software overall plan

Posted Mar 19, 2013 13:48 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> From a compatibility point of view, Windows rules supreme. I don't know any desktop OS with this kind of application compatibility.

BeOS/Haiku? Don't drivers for BeOS still work on Haiku today? Now if you meant "used desktop OS", then I do think I'd have to agree. Though, pre-NT-era apps (particularly games) can no longer work (I have a few laying around), WINE-on-Windows might end up being the best way forward for that compatibility.