Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)'s status on Monday, 15-Jan-2024 01:09:30 JST

Also, some of the incentives for “bloat” and disincentives for “lean software design” Wirth describes hold for proprietary software, but not so much for free software.

Yet, free software does suffer from the same problem.

20 years ago I’d run GNU/Linux, X11, Firefox, Emacs, Guile, etc. on my Sun UltraSparc4 (64-bit SPARC!). Would I be able to run modern versions of these things on that machine? I doubt it.

Why is that?

(Linux and Debian dropped SPARC64 years ago anyway.)