• Daeraxa@lemmy.ml
      0·
      10 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·
        10 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·
          10 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

          • lad@programming.dev
            0·
            10 months ago

            Yeah, it’s just that I have recently tried to find an active fork, ao experienced this

        • flatlined@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          0·
          10 months ago

          What tools would you recommend to fund good forks. I’ve had a Firefox extension or two but they’ve either creased working or weren’t fantastic to begin with. Currently just using the network graph, limitations and all.

  • dan@upvote.au
    4·
    10 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.

    • lad@programming.dev
      4·
      10 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

      • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
        0·
        10 months ago

        If a software is compromised to allow remote code execution, then the situation is pretty dire even without elevated privileges.

        Basically your entire userspace will be compromised, and in terms of personal computing that is pretty much all you can lose.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      1·
      10 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·
        10 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 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.

          • dan@upvote.au
            0·
            10 months ago

            The fact that a compat mode exists means that Microsoft put effort into backwards compatibility. Windows even emulates some old bugs for old popular apps that depended on them.

            • toastal@lemmy.ml
              0·
              10 months ago

              I don’t like Microsoft Windows at all, but you are absolutely right about doing a good job with backwards compatibility.

              Linux isn’t so backwards compatible, but with much of it having open source code, you can often compile it again yourself—tho having been written in a language that offers good backwards compatibility also helps.

      • jcg@halubilo.social
        1·
        10 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

      • dan@upvote.au
        0·
        10 months ago

        It is. I was just using WinDirStat as an example of an old app that people still use. The 1.1.2 release from 2005 is still downloaded 60,000 times per week according to the stats on the Sourceforge download page.

        • greencactus@lemmy.world
          0·
          10 months ago

          Sorry, that’s now how I meant my original post - I just thought that I really like SPD already and was interested in what PD makes better/ what features SPD missed. I in no way wanted to say that PD was bad, just was excited to know what PD made better :)

          • beetus@lemmy.world
            1·
            10 months ago

            I think you are misinterpreting the arrows. Pixel dungeon is the original game with SPD being the preferred fork

            The arrows aren’t PD > (greater than) SPD

            But rather PD -> (turned into) SPD

  • umbrella@lemmy.ml
    1·
    10 months ago

    yo but tbh this gets old.

    i just want my stuff to update without me having to find out a year later its unmantained and had a fork all along.

    or having to watch the repositories of stuff i use for signs it might be unmantained.

    libforknotifier when (or even how)?

    • lemmyingly@lemm.ee
      0·
      10 months ago

      I’ve kept away from some projects because it’s just a single dev doing 99.9% of the contributions.

    • irotsoma@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      Yeah, it would be nice if it was easier for devs to just turn over the project to an “official” fork. Unfortunately, I’m sure that would get abused by scammers taking over projects forcefully and adding in malware before anyone notices.

      • lud@lemm.ee
        0·
        10 months ago

        I am pretty sure you can transfer ownership of a repo on GitHub.

      • 9point6@lemmy.world
        0·
        10 months ago

        You’re spot on with the latter, I’ve come across a few projects over the years where the ownership is transferred and it’s then loaded up with malware or even just instantly abandoned again because the new owner just wants it on their GitHub to get a job or something.

        • Gestrid@lemmy.caEnglish
          0·
          10 months ago

          I’ve come across a few projects over the years where the ownership is transferred and it’s then loaded up with malware

          See: The Great Suspender

          The original developer sold the repo to a new, anonymous maintainer. The new maintainer abandoned the repo but continued updating the Chrome Web Store version of the addon. That version eventually got delisted by Google for including malware.

        • pingveno@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          10 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·
        10 months ago

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

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      I actually paid for synergy because I was using it extensively back in the day (probably about 10 years ago? Maybe less? IDK. Long enough that I don’t care to remember when); and after an update I realized the windows service portion had a bad memory leak. I don’t reboot my PC very often, so I kept getting memory errors despite having more memory than the average (I believe it was 24G at the time, when 8G was considered “good” instead of it being the bare minimum that it is now)… I couldn’t even always fix it by restarting the service, since it was some kind of memory mapped file or something that was causing the problem, so it didn’t register normally that the process was consuming the space. The only way to fully resolve the problem was to disable the service (or remove the software) and restart. So I abandoned synergy for a long time because I wasn’t sure when they would actually recognize the problem and fix it.

      I got a notice late last year that synergy had updated and my license was going to be given a free upgrade so I could use the newer version at no extra cost, so I figured it would be a good time to try it again, and I had a situation come up in December (ish) where I actually wanted to see if I could get it working; I couldn’t. Now that I’m running exclusively multi monitor setups, synergy’s configuration doesn’t actually give you the option of setting where your screens are connected individually or anything, it just shows each PC as a single display, and for the life of me, not only could I not get it right, but I couldn’t even find the trigger point that would move my mouse and keyboard controls to the other system. Even if I managed to get them over there, I had no idea how, and I had no idea how to get back.

      So I disconnected it entirely and I’m back at square one. I bought a multimonitor KVM to fix another problem and it reduced or eliminated my need to use synergy… But I still want synergy to work (or something like it). Is barrier more robust?

        • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
          0·
          10 months ago

          Does this only work for Windows?

          I was hoping for something cross platform. Since synergy sucks and will probably continue to suck for a while, I’d like to find something in the interim, or to replace it entirely so I can control a Linux system from my windows PC, or something like that.

          Don’t get me wrong, this is great for Windows, but I originally got synergy because I was using a Linux system as a media player, so I could mouse over and change tracks or load a playlist or whatever I wanted to do without having to reach across the room for another keyboard or something like that.

          I haven’t used that set up in a while, though I might switch back to it with a raspberry Pi or something eventually, and just have a small micro system playing media using chromium to load up YouTube music (or whatever). The old set up was the Linux system using xmmp (I believe) to play music from a NAS. The output went through a physical mixer, so I had immediate access to turn up, or down, the music from my media system, without dedicating resources to music on my main (gaming) system. This was back in the days of Windows XP and I wanted to squeeze every last FPS I could from my main system, so I offloaded my music to another system; which was some old P4 that I had lying around. The HDD was questionable so I never put anything on it that I couldn’t lose, hence all the music was on my network storage.

          At the same time I was using the network storage system (I call it a NAS, but it was really a Windows box with some file shares) to do other offloading tasks, like downloading Linux ISOs from torrent files.

          I did a lot to ensure my system would not get bogged down. I have servers now for any file shares and torrent stuff, but I’ve never solved the media system problem. Using a pi or similar SBC and piping the audio through the mixer I still have connected to my main computer is still appealing to me… Among other things… And just putting up a display for it next to my monitors and roaming my mouse and keyboard to it to pick what I want to watch/listen to, still seems like a good idea to me.

          I don’t want to get restricted to Windows to do it though, since then I would need a much more power-hungry system to run it. I’ve concerned myself a lot more with efficiency since I was younger, considering that I’m paying for my own power now. Historically, I would be paying for it through rent that includes utilities. I own a house now and pay all my own utilities. So a sub 10W pi sounds good. Most windows systems, even very lightweight systems usually need at least double that.