• dan@upvote.au
    2·
    8 months ago

    Keep in mind that software doesn’t have an expiry date. If a piece of software is unmaintained and doesn’t have an active fork but it still fulfills your use case and doesn’t have any major issues, there’s no need to replace it. Some of the software I use hasn’t seen any updates in five years but I still use it because it still works.

    Edit: As an example, a lot of people still use WinDirStat even though the latest release 1.1.2 is now 17 years old.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      1·
      8 months ago

      Desktop - Linux - Yes, likely. If not, here’s a flatpak
      Desktop - Windows - Maybe it still runs in a compatibility mode?
      Desktop - iMac - Here’s an emulator, good luck.

      Mobile - PostMarketOS - Yes, likely. If not, here’s a flatpak
      Mobile - Android - Maybe? Try it and see if you get permission denial
      Mobile - iPhone - Fuck you, no.

      • dan@upvote.au
        0·
        8 months ago

        Windows is pretty good with backwards compatibility, probably the best out of anything. I can run Visual Basic apps I wrote in the early 2000s on Windows 11 and they still run fine. Some old 32-bit games work fine too. You can even run some 16-bit Windows 3.0 apps on 32-bit Windows 10 if you manually install NTVDM through the Windows features (it was never ported to 64-bit though)

        Linux is okay for backcompat but I’m not sure an app I compiled 20 years ago would still run today.

    • lad@programming.dev
      1·
      8 months ago

      I’d say that problems mostly come from the need to update dependencies in case of vulnerabilities being discovered. But not every software needs elevated privileges or can become a vector of attack, I guess

      • jcg@halubilo.social
        1·
        8 months ago

        I use windirstat almost monthly and have never heard of WizTree. Keeping this in mind for next time I use it.

        Though at this point, maybe I should just commit honestly

    • Daeraxa@lemmy.ml
      0·
      8 months ago

      This is the problem, making the fork known to the userbase of the original software. When the Atom text editor was killed by Microsoft we decided to fork it as Pulsar but it was an uphill struggle to really get the word out. We got a massive boost when the youtuber Distrotube featured us in an episode and again with an itsfoss article but we still routinely find people who have been using Atom without knowing we even exist.

      • lad@programming.dev
        0·
        8 months ago

        You found some more by commenting about it now.

        But if the fork is on GitHub there are some ways to search for the most maintained forks, albeit not with the GitHub tools which is unfortunate

        • Hexarei@programming.dev
          1·
          8 months ago

          There’s always the fork network graph, but it’s not exactly easy to spot which forks are good, just the ones with the most recent commits

        • pingveno@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          8 months ago

          Sun Microsystems bought Star Division, the original creators of StarOffice, which was proprietary. Sun open sourced OpenOffice, with StarOffice still available with proprietary add-ons. When Oracle bought up Sun, they first reduced resources to OpenOffice and then shut it down altogether when LibreOffice came along, with trademarks and such assigned to the Apache project.

      • deus@lemmy.world
        1·
        8 months ago

        The original OpenOffice is no longer in development. LibreOffice is an active fork of that.

        • Gestrid@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          8 months ago

          And I believe it’s being developed by some of the same people, too.

      • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
        0·
        8 months ago

        afaik it got bought by some company and people fear that there will be anti-user changes like with all the other open source projects that were bought by a company in recent years.

        • lastweakness@lemmy.world
          1·
          8 months ago

          No company has bought gitea. They just made a commercial entity which can accept contracts for enterprise installations and make some hyper specific customisations not needed for normal users (like some specific mode of internal authentication) in those installations. So far Gitea has been great still.