Given enough time, open-source will win. Just think about how more and more people are programming and how that will draw them to open-source.
> given enough time
This has been a lifetime for a slice of the human population.
It’s getting into Sagrada Familia territory.
The article talks about construction on the exterior, the cross on the main tower, the Pope's visit and commemoration of the architect, etc. while on the official website the timeline says "Today, more than 140 years after the laying of the cornerstone, construction continues on the Basilica": https://sagradafamilia.org/en/history-of-the-temple
So which one is it? Is this one of those cases where we have to define "done" first?
The big achievement that happened recently is they completed the towers, so it finally reached its target height. Also the Pope's blessing.
Right, there is a long tradition in it taking centuries to build great cathedrals, Chartres, Notre Dame, etc.
I've little issue with that, however taking so long to build something such as an O/S that it's obsoleted itself many times over before being finished is another matter altogether.
Or "A million monkeys with a million typewriters writing Shakespeare" territory
Case in point, ReactOS is far behind what Windows 11 is capable of, and this not taking into account the ARM and CoPilot+ PC hardware changes in modern motherboards.
It is nonetheless relevant, especially in the presence of escape mechanisms to oppressive governments, and digital sovereignty.
Not just for that. There's an awful, awful lot of ancient embedded hardware running machinery sometimes worth dozens of millions of dollars, and it's running even more ancient software. Siemens, for example, recently searched for people capable of (and willing to) working with Windows 3.11 [1], presumably to deal with the HMI displays for locomotive/train drivers.
When dealing with hardware or software that has lifecycles measured in half-centuries, bridges to allow modern tooling to work with it are really, really important.
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Deutsche-Bahn-sucht-Admin-fuer-Win...
lol I guess, it doesn’t annoy you with endless ads and pop ups, doesn’t try to steal your data and passwords, doesn’t force you to buy an entire new computer just to run it. Far behind indeed.
Difficulty: QoL features added to undo the effects of bad design changes in Win11 don’t count, such as “compact view” in Windows 11 File Explorer.
Here is another one, enforced application sandboxing and signing, comming up in a future update this year, year another useful one for security.
Yet another one, ability to actually use Windows containers without having the same kernel version between host and guest, useful for Windows developers.
Three for the price of one, there you go.
Only downside is that defining custom sequences is… less than intuitive.
More importantly, as I've mentioned, ReactOS is not stable nor reliable enough to even use as an offline O/S sans the Win 11 dross.
If these stability/compatibility issues were fixed then it'd develop a reputation for being reliable which would lead to further development work.
Unfortunately for everyone except Microsoft this is not the case.
This is not always the case. Open source projects also die.
We need to improve the funding situation. I have no idea how to do that, but we really need to tackle that problem.
The better the specs of a commercial product, the easier it would be to produce an open source version it, with coding and testing automation perhaps even a one-to-one offering.
More reliable than any specification, considering Windows itself is a patchwork of workarounds to not break backward-compatibility.