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  "publishedAt": "2026-04-30T02:53:20.000Z",
  "site": "http://forum.palemoon.org",
  "textContent": "> You understand. You really do. Ensuring that you do was my purpose in describing my own position. I should likewise apologise if I seemed to wish to make you feel guilty in my earlier post. I knew my phrasing was poor, but could not think of any better.\n\nYeah, it's all good. You didn't say anything wrong.\n\n\n> Speaking, of course, as a layman, my perspective has been upside-down. Windows 10 was, and Windows 11 is, unfit for my use (among other reasons) because of their own ‘upgrade or die’ mentality, chiefly due to forced updates. The long-term releases of at least some Linux distributions, as long as the better Windows versions, led me to think of Linux as the more patient of the two, as long as one kept away from bleeding-edge distros like Arch. Over five years of continuous Linux use later, I can feel more often how many developers tend to neglect even slightly older editions of the same distro, even if they remain in long-term support. I now see the error of my first impression.\n>\n> Since Windows remains intolerable and shows no signs of ever getting better, what is there for me in years to come? In the last few days, I have been thinking to myself that I should purchase a Raspberry Pi 400 or two to keep on hand as spare computers in the event this one fails. Assuming I am running Debian 13 on it, that could carry me securely to 2035. What then? So much depends on the precise conditions several years hence which are impossible to predict. Maintaining the software I like against an ever more hostile development mainstream is something I can only realistically address day by day, month by month, year by year, as problems present themselves. Your efforts help make the way easier for me, and you have my deepest thanks for this.\n\nYeah, that is worth expounding on. My perspective is this... Windows has, even at the Windows 10 and Windows 11 level, been much better at supporting older binaries and keeping a stable ABI for things like plugins compared with Linux. So for developers, it's a more forgiving platform. You don't have to do nearly as much work to support Windows 10 if you supported Windows 7, or nearly as much work to support Windows 11 if you supported 10. Windows lately has a nasty habit of breaking the user experience and pushing updates (though I hear they're considering bringing back the way to pause them after the amount of backlash recently), but is still a lot more forgiving of older binaries and providing ways to get code with older assumptions to compile cleanly. Whether you love or hate Windows 11, it can still be used to compile Pale Moon and still runs all our tooling. So it's stable for the developer, and still runs most old programs, but manages to piss off users with an ugly UI and forced updates in recent versions.\n\nLinux is... almost the reverse, tries to avoid breaking userspace, keep things looking the same for users across versions (at least on the surface), but tends to break things for developers under the hood. Something like MATE might even fool some people into thinking not much has changed since GNOME 2 unless you wanted it to, that you have choice and freedom, and everything is still fine and nothing has changed in a big way. When in reality, MATE is using GTK3 (rather than GTK2) in a very careful way to recreate the GNOME 2 experience, systemd stuff is symlinked to traditional sysvinit commands, and really everything that looks familiar to someone on the surface may well be powered by something totally new under the hood. Linux is... weirdly good at making things feel like they haven't changed as much as they have for users who know a little but aren't experts, while forcing to developers to get on the upgrade treadmill or watch their work collapse beneath the waves. Much like the web with Chromium, I'd actually compare the Linux churn on the platform side to the Chromium churn on the web side. The website looks the same and does the same thing as it always did in Chrome or maybe even Firefox, but it pulled in a newer version of a framework that uses new mechanisms and now it breaks in Pale Moon. Linux feels like it's driven by the same mentality. That's where the web/Chrome analogy comes in.\n\n* * *",
  "title": "Platform Development • Re: Future of GTK2 and Pale Moon",
  "updatedAt": "2026-04-30T02:53:20.000Z"
}