The goal of commercial software is to get paid, but Microsoft has been sleazebag number one or two in computing since forever. (It's hard to decide these days between them, IBM, and Oracle...) More on-topic though, if Microsoft wanted to ensure Xbox compatibility then they would have had to also require a relatively advanced GPU, which they didn't do.

That's why I said it was sideways. The distinction is artificial.

The mission is fuck you and with no remorse.

Yes, and spare no sleazebaggery.

I did it for a while, it's nice that they package the necessary files with the kernel, but it's nicer to not have to. These days I get a current kernel and a ntsync module without having to do anything special.

On one hand, stability is more important than new shiny. On the other, I have long awaited features which aren't available in some software versions, including in KDE where I really don't want to replace the whole thing.

Sure there are. Some bug reports, you look at them and dig in and say "Damn, that's obscure. It depends on subtly-wrong but arguably-correct-in-isolation mistakes in four different places. How the hell did they even find that?".

Granted that it's more common to glance at it and just be ashamed, or to look at it and say "Really? You think an attacker can do A, B, C, D, and E, all at the same time? Oh, and to do B or D they'd already have to have the system mostly compromised. Okay, I'll fix it, but no way in hell is that actually exploitable."

Sorry, but you're wrong.

Maybe... if the projections are in formal filings I don't think they can do that without risking SEC penalties. They can be optimistic about revenues or falling costs or things, because who can tell? But straight up ignoring things, probably not.

It is, and I understand that, but I still place most of the blame with Google for creating such a distinction. It smacks of incompetence to not plan for users to be able to operate apps intended for one of those environments in theyl other

Nah, they will keep slowing down old devices with new features users didn't ask for in order to induce additional sales

"The US military isn't socialist, except that it tries to provide for it's members in compensation for the risks they take."

It should try harder

I live in a rural area where no provider works well, you insensitive clod!

They have an unparalleled level of oversight and accountability for a free distribution. It's worth dealing with the outdated packages. These days, on topic, at least you can get current kernels from backports.

We know you're a POS due to your language choices

You said that this creates an arms race, which implies that it's a question of capability.

I strongly dislike dynamically-typed languages like Python. They're okay for toy programs but for anything of any size... you'd better have one hell of a good test suite because the tools give you absolutely no help. I want strong, static typing. I want a very picky compiler that won't accept anything that isn't exactly correct. C++ is good. Rust is better. I do like type inference so I don't have to manually specify types very often. C++ is reasonably good at this. Rust is better.

I also do a fair amount of work on very tiny systems, programming on the bare metal. Something like Python is a complete non-starter there, it just won't fit. C is the norm for those cases, but C is almost as loosey-goosey as Python, but without any run-time checks. C++ is much better than C. Rust is better yet.

The worst non-hardware bug I've ever dealt with in nearly 40 years of professional programming was in Python, using the Twisted framework. I traced it down to one place that took a pure abstract interface, instantiated it, then called methods on it!. Even logging the type of the instantiated object showed that it was the abstract type. Someone way too clever had built a dependency injection framework that was so magical that there was absolutely no way to figure out what dependency was being injected.

I also have AI write most of my code these days, but that actually increases my desire for a very picky compiler, because AI does a lot better with those guardrails in place.