Metal is vendor lock-in from a vendor that owns like, what, _maybe_ 10% of the market if we're being generous? And that 10% of the market is a group that largely is already disinclined to care about video games, so you're already unlikely to capture a noticeable portion of that already-small minority market segment. Yeah, it sucked to be tied to their platform, but at least you were tied to the platform that nearly your entire target audience was already using. I suspect that soon MS will bail and start telling people to virtualize software targeting anything older than Windows 8.1 or 10.ĭirectX was also crappy vendor lock-in, but let's not pretend that the similarities go beyond that.ĭirectX was vendor lock-in _from the vendor that owned 80-to-90-percent of the market_.

Windows’ backwards compatibility is good but has meant that many parts of the OS are effectively frozen in time which has complicated modernization efforts. With OS X the bits under the hood have always been in a state of flux even if the user facing bits barely changed at all, which makes backwards compatibility extremely challenging short of shipping virtualized old OS versions (which brings its own challenges, such as having to patch 0-days those old versions for however long you plan to keep compatibility for each version around). The longest period old apps were supported was probably in the classic Mac OS era stretching from System 7.5 or so up through OS 9, but that was mainly due to how little the OS changed in that timespan (relative to contemporary OSes and OS X in the the same length of time). Long-reaching backwards compatibility has never been an Apple thing due to how it encumbers OS development. I assume that on Linux you ship with all dependencies included, because if you rely on whatever is supplied by the user’s distro’s package manager provided things will be breaking all the time.

For apple instal Hades II