Here is a list of OSes[0]. Where do you draw the line on supporting these? Should every new project try to support all of these? Do you, doublerabbit, get to decide which OSes are important enough for support?
Or do you think the person who created the project and does all the work should be able to decide where to spend their free time?
Where those are still in active development. Where those exist you should attempt at least for. It's partly why they failed in the first place.
> Should every new project try to support all of these?
As said above, attempt. My projects in Perl work most places, my TCL programs do too. C and C++ all have been universes. Heck even Python.
It's only new fangled languages like Rust and Go that make an ball ache.
> Do you, doublerabbit, get to decide which OSes are important enough for support?
Yeah why not, at least allowed to voice an opinion. I'm so sick and tired seeing the world of IT on repeat. See it get abused, capitalised and freedom sucked from it. I give Linux five more years before it will be smothered in corporate.
After working as an sysadmin from the age of 13, to 35. I wish I could call done but other opportunities are not feasible at this time. The amount of bug reports I've submitted across the board is more than a dozen. Hand crafted brittle configuration files, been there done that. This isn't just me being edgy.
For more the past twenty years we've only dominated one bloody OS. Only then do we all bitch at each other because of fanboi or whatever cliche is at the moment. Systemd comes to mind.
I am so bored of the neo-Linux crowd and I've been working with it for it since 2.x kernel.
Only when you jump off the bandwagon do you see how clunky it really is.
First HN was shouting at me how a new browser could never be made and now HN is jumping up and down because one has yet won't acknowledge that other OS exist and that I personally feel developers should catered for.
> C and C++ all have been universes. Heck even Python.
> It's only new fangled languages like Rust and Go that make an ball ache.
is not even remotely accurate. The whole idea of the Rust and Go standard libraries is to abstract platform differences away, and in cases where they're unavoidable, to make them impossible to ignore. Python, by comparison, handles them badly. It does certified Bad Things like making POSIX operations silent no-ops on non-POSIX platforms. C doesn't even try. Any cross-platform C program is an #ifdef minefield, and you'll only find out whether it works on a given platform when you try to compile it and start getting obscure library header errors.
People like you is why people burn out from open source. Can't create anything without random nobodies who spend zero effort on anything shouting at you and hurling insults at you. You're being a completely toxic asshole.
No, it's not me at all. People like you are the reason why I suffer from burn out.
The burn out is because your working on an single platform and refusing to even attempt for another project, or OS for this matter. That's how I find it.
Lets reinvent the wheel for the same OS where the wheel has already been reinvented. Yet lets not reinvent the wheel for another OS.
> The burn out is because your working on an single platform and refusing to even attempt for another project
If you only knew how ridiculous this statement is then you wouldn't have made it. I've spent about ten years working in the BSD community, sent some patches to FreeBSD just a few weeks ago, spent quite a lot of time improving the Go kqueue integration recently, have donated to both FreeBSD and OpenBSD over the years, I have VMs for all the BSDs (and illumos) and regularly test things with it if need be, etc. etc.
But that doesn't mean I expect everyone to make the same choices. Some people choose to support only Windows. That's fine. Some people choose to only support OpenBSD. That's fine. And some people choose to only support Linux. And that's fine too.
If you're getting burned out because other people aren't spending their free time in the fashion you wish then your burnout is 100% self-inflicted.
This kind of hostility towards Linux was already getting old back in the FreeBSD 4 days.
You are being extremely rude and entitled throughout this entire thread. No one is under any obligation to bring their software to any given platform.
I don't think anyone disagrees that the world would be better if software were freely available on everyone's platform of choice. But you're coming up against fundamental resource limits -- there are only so many people working on a given project and there is only so much time in a day. Resource constraints are why you yourself are not doing the work and resource constraints are why other people are not doing the work.
You answered earlier that it'd be less work for everyone involved if the original authors simply ported the software, and perhaps so, but I'm not convinced of this. I would have a difficult time porting my software to MacOS for example because I've never used the platform. And even if so, I have a limited amount of time on earth. In terms of maximizing utility of my time, I think there is a strong argument that spending my time improving the software quality instead of improving its reach will result more happiness overall. Partly because you cover more than 99% of people by targeting mainstream platforms. FreeBSD for example cannot account for anywhere near 1% marketshare.
In the case of Serenity, it's not yet even in a usable state as a replacement browser. Let them focus on getting it usable. It's the type of thing that will eventually appear on BSD when it gets good enough to be used.
None of this is going to change by you leaving rude comments to the people doing open source work. I think the net result of it, if anything, is reduced interest in porting.
You have to understand and accept that you have made an ideological choice on what platform you use. You have to understand that your platform has an absolutely minimal number of users. The inevitable consequence of this is less software available for your platform. It isn't a grand conspiracy, it isn't spite, it isn't me acting like the BSD's do not deserve ports -- it's just the fundamental nature of reality and resource constraints.
Even folks on Linux are sacrificing on software and convenience and Linux has a market share which is likely multiple orders of magnitude larger than FreeBSD.
I'm sorry you're feeling burned out, but posting mean and entitled comments online is not going to help. It's only going to spread the burnout like a mind virus, causing others to feel burned out themselves.
I think if you care, go help them make Ladybird work on your OS. People who make software for fun and give it away for free owe all of us precisely nothing: I believe that’s a very important principle, otherwise they’ll just burn out as their hobby project turns into a grind.
Why? For this whole reason. What does it matter? You should target all audiences.
Why not?