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Is software getting worse?
(blog.ploeh.dk)
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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Not FOSS but commercial software is. The apps just get more bloated and want to suck even more data with each update. Then there is the sites that have hundreds of trackers and third party cookies from everywhere and need 1gb to display 🙄. OK maybe not 1gb but you get the gist.
Yep totally unheard of for foss software to get worse. Gnome 3 and kde 4 for example were universally acclaimed.
I think that the post author just neglects that software has become mindblowingly complex compared to the days of yore, if you put together all the features of netscape + win 3.11 + wordperfect + whatever other thing they were using in the 90s at any given point you don’t get 10% of the complexity of a contemporary productivity app (say outlook) let alone a full operating system.
It’s clear that the more complex something is the more things can break. It’s like complaining that F16s are worse than consumer 40€ drones because the former require maintenance every few hours of flight while the latter don’t.
He's not exactly comparing software to netscape or win 3.11 though, he's comparing version N of some software to version N-1 or N-2 and noticing that they're getting worse from release to release. Given the rate of new releases the complexity shouldn't be increasing that rapidly between releases so I'm not convinced that is the cause per se. I have to agree with the conclusion from the article, testing was more rigorous in the past than it is now. Both because there was less surface area to test back then and because time-to-market pressures were less due to the longer windows between releases.