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It's sad because it removes choice from users over what OS to run. People that only use windows are going and throwing their old computers away.

by ux2664781 hours ago|

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I think of it more in the reverse, the choice being removed is the hardware you can use. It has been the case from the dawn of computing that you start from a usecase (which correlates to software, which maps to an operating system) and then look at your options for hardware. The more specific your usecase, the more specific your software, which correlates to a specific choice of hardware. There is no, and can be no, "have it all". It's a fundamental principle of mathematics, the postulates you choose radically change the set of proofs you have access to, and the set of proofs you choose entail the axioms and structures you can take.

Now it can be better or worse, and right now it's never been better. There was a time when your language, your shell and your operating system were specific to the exact model of computer (not just a patched kernel, everything was fully bespoke) and you have a very limited set of peripherals. That we suffer from more esoteric operating systems lagging behind the bleeding edge of extremely complicated peripherals is a very good place to be in. That there's always room for improvement shouldn't be cause for sadness.

by AshamedCaptain1 hours ago|

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> Now it can be better or worse, and right now it's never been better. There was a time when your language, your shell and your operating system were specific to the exact model of comput

No, it is not. There was a small period of time between the 90s and the 2010s where you could grab almost every 386 OS and have your hardware mostly decently run for it, and if not, drivers would be easily written from manufacturer specifications. That time was definitely better then than what we have today, or what we had before then. I am writing this as someone who was written serial port controller drivers for the BeOS.

> That we suffer from more esoteric operating systems lagging behind the bleeding edge of extremely complicated peripherals is a very good place to be in.

This is the wrong logic, because operating systems become esoteric since they can't support the hardware, and hardware becomes complicated and under-specified because there's basically only one operating system to take care of. You may _think_ you have no reason to be sad if you're a user of Windows or Linux, but you have plenty anyway.