TromboneChat

Is anyone else having increasing trouble with legacy apps as Windows accumulates updates?

The "Windows Compatibility Settings" usually aren't enough anymore.

I can understand why some old serial hardware might not work but did they have to give up on the magic spell support?

Perhaps you need a new wand.

More important, what's this I hear about Windows 11?

timothy42b wrote: ↑Fri Jul 23, 2021 7:10 am More important, what's this I hear about Windows 11?

It can't be good, whatever it is. I used to love Windows 10. Then suddenly the too-frequent updates started hogging 100% of my system resources and disk usage. Started maybe about 6 months ago. It went from the best, most compatible windows ever to something that just chokes on its own cud.

If Microsoft's plan is to make me not like the current (arguably great) OS by making the amount and method of updates unbearable, all so that I hopefully buy into windows 11, the future is not looking good for my computer trying to run an even more resource intensive OS.

Windows 95 was great
Windows 98 was great
Windows 2000 millennium edition stunk
Windows XP reeked
Windows Vista stunk
Windows 7 was great
Windows 8 was not
Windows 9 was so bad they didn't even release it
Windows 10 is great
Why do we need a Windows 11 anyways - the track record is not good.

I believe the frequent updates are the result of the "Agile" methodology of software development. That is all about speed to market and not software stability. The thinking is "we don't care if it works. We just need to be the first to get it out. We'll just ship a new update tomorrow if we find any problems. Let the customers test it."

Imagine what would happen if Microsoft started making trombones. Just about the time you get used to the position of the cross braces, they replace them with the new "improved" version. No choice, just a whole new configuration from out of nowhere. And, by the way, you can't use the beast until the installation is complete and there's no support for the old model. Once they stop supporting your old tried and true model, it stops functioning.

sacfxdx wrote: ↑Fri Jul 23, 2021 7:38 am That is all about speed to market and not software stability.

What market is that?

We don't buy these updates. I didn't buy Windows 10... it was a free upgrade from 7.


We're not going to switch to a competing OS if Windows lacked whatever it is that is getting added.

??

robcat2075 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 23, 2021 5:29 pm
What market is that?

We don't buy these updates. I didn't buy Windows 10... it was a free upgrade from 7.


We're not going to switch to a competing OS if Windows lacked whatever it is that is getting added.

??

You are not the only customer.

sacfxdx wrote: ↑Fri Jul 23, 2021 6:14 pm

robcat2075 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 23, 2021 5:29 pm
What market is that?

We don't buy these updates. I didn't buy Windows 10... it was a free upgrade from 7.


We're not going to switch to a competing OS if Windows lacked whatever it is that is getting added.

??

You are not the only customer.

That is the answer to "who is not the market?"

I was just explaining the software development methodology. Not looking for an argument.

I was looking for an answer.

That's actually not what Agile is, fwiw. Agile is more-or-less in contrast to "waterfall". Both methodologies are describing the development lifecycle. Typically, with waterfall you do the whole lifecycle in a cascading timeline... requirements then development then testing, over the course of the entire project. With Agile, you do "sprints" where you define requirements, develop, and test within say a 2 week time period. You do many of those time periods over the course of a project so that you can deliver finished features and iterate when the client inevitably decides that their specs weren't what they actually wanted.

So typically there is more testing done and the updates are smaller, which is why there are many of them. MS also trickles out feature updates to users who don't opt-out of it, so that they introduce say 5% of users an update, then 15%, then 35%, etc. but that doesn't mean it's tested on customers, per se. It means that when tests inevitably bring up edge cases, they might not go out to all of their customers at the same time. The alternative isn't "bug free development", it's introducing all the edge cases to all customers are the same time which in my opinion more resembles having your customers test your product than a phased release.

But to answer the original question, I try to stick to more recent software on my windows boxes and anything that's legacy I try to stick to open source and ideally on my Linux machines because I do find running legacy software on windows to be hit or miss. I stand a better chance at being able to always reproduce my workflows that way when I don't have to worry about licenses etc. I wish MuseScore more closely resembled the UI of Sibelius because I'm about 20x faster in Sib than MuseScore and its about the only proprietary software that I still use that is unrelated to my day job.