Along the same vein, too many open source projects don’t factor in non-“gnu/linux” environments from the start.
No one is entitled to anything from open-source projects.
I spent time making sure one of my public tools was cross platform once. This was pre-Rust (a C project), and before CI runners were commonly available.
I did manage it with relative ease, but Mac/mac (what is it now?) without hardware or VMware wasn’t fun (or even supported/allowed). Windows was a space hog and it’s a shit non-POSIX OS created by shits anyway, and Cygwin/MSYS wouldn’t have cut it for multiple reasons including performance. The three major BSDs, however, were very easy (I had prior experience with FreeBSD, but it would have been easy in any case).
People seem to have forgotten that doing open-source was supposed to be fun first and for most. Or rather, the new generation seems to never have gotten that memo.
POSIX is usually where a good balance between fun and public service is struck. Whether Mac/mac is included depends on the project, AND the developers involved. With CLI tools, supporting Mac/mac is often easy, especially nowadays with CI runners. With GUIs, it’s more complicated/situational.
Windows support should always be seen as charity, not an obligation, for all projects where it’s not the primary target platform.
In reality Windows isn’t the most widely used platform, not where it counts, among the developers of those libraries. And finding competent Windows developers to contribute also isn’t easy while finding Windows users demanding support is quite easy since the factor of developers per user is so much worse on that platform.
Good.
Too many libraries/frameworks/products don’t factor in accessibility from the start.
Along the same vein, too many open source projects don’t factor in non-“gnu/linux” environments from the start.
It’s a lot harder to tack on after the fact rather than just having it be a part of the base design from the beginning.
Making these front and centre in a survey should be a be a bit of a wakeup for people who don’t consider what doesn’t run on their machines.
No one is entitled to anything from open-source projects.
I spent time making sure one of my public tools was cross platform once. This was pre-Rust (a C project), and before CI runners were commonly available.
I did manage it with relative ease, but Mac/mac (what is it now?) without hardware or VMware wasn’t fun (or even supported/allowed). Windows was a space hog and it’s a shit non-POSIX OS created by shits anyway, and Cygwin/MSYS wouldn’t have cut it for multiple reasons including performance. The three major BSDs, however, were very easy (I had prior experience with FreeBSD, but it would have been easy in any case).
People seem to have forgotten that doing open-source was supposed to be fun first and for most. Or rather, the new generation seems to never have gotten that memo.
POSIX is usually where a good balance between fun and public service is struck. Whether Mac/mac is included depends on the project, AND the developers involved. With CLI tools, supporting Mac/mac is often easy, especially nowadays with CI runners. With GUIs, it’s more complicated/situational.
Windows support should always be seen as charity, not an obligation, for all projects where it’s not the primary target platform.
I never said anything contrary to this.
Letting MacOS users support MacOS hardware is generally easy when you already have BSD and/or busybox support already.
Ordinarily I’d agree, except these are GUI Libraries.
The whole point of them is to be a generic interface that prevents you from needing to use the platform specific APIs directly.
If GUI libraries aren’t going to target the most widely used platforms, then why wouldn’t the developer just use the platform specific APIs directly?
In reality Windows isn’t the most widely used platform, not where it counts, among the developers of those libraries. And finding competent Windows developers to contribute also isn’t easy while finding Windows users demanding support is quite easy since the factor of developers per user is so much worse on that platform.