This is a fairly technical meme. Userspace is not the same as user preferences, and in this case refers to application compatibility. Applications written by third party developers (i.e. not the creators of the OS itself) are almost always in userspace and not kernelspace.
Windows and the Linux Kernel devs go to great lengths to ensure that they are backwards compatible, sometimes to a fault. For example, there are certain bugs that are left in place and not fixed because some applications have adapted to the bugs and now rely on that behavior. If the bugs were fixed, suddenly those apps would break and the developers of those apps would need to create an update. That’s complicated or even impossible if the app developer has been out of business since the 90s/dies/is locked up in legal limbo/etc.
You can still run games and other software from the 90s on Windows 11, but there is software from the 2010s that won’t run on the latest version of macOS because Apple doesn’t give a fuck about maintaining backwards compatibility (breaking userspace).
To keep it simple one could say userspace is what the average user faces. Eg the audio engine, the desktop shell, the window tiler,…
So basically the things that make your apps and make them work.
Windows 11 has the ability to natively run XP software iirc because they don’t break the underlying systems, they rather extend them.
macOS in the other hand changes stuff all the time and if a developer doesn’t catch up with that, the next macOS release will break the software.
Can you please explain what “userspace” means? Because my win11 install constantly tries to add new apps to the start menu
This is a fairly technical meme. Userspace is not the same as user preferences, and in this case refers to application compatibility. Applications written by third party developers (i.e. not the creators of the OS itself) are almost always in userspace and not kernelspace.
Windows and the Linux Kernel devs go to great lengths to ensure that they are backwards compatible, sometimes to a fault. For example, there are certain bugs that are left in place and not fixed because some applications have adapted to the bugs and now rely on that behavior. If the bugs were fixed, suddenly those apps would break and the developers of those apps would need to create an update. That’s complicated or even impossible if the app developer has been out of business since the 90s/dies/is locked up in legal limbo/etc.
You can still run games and other software from the 90s on Windows 11, but there is software from the 2010s that won’t run on the latest version of macOS because Apple doesn’t give a fuck about maintaining backwards compatibility (breaking userspace).
To keep it simple one could say userspace is what the average user faces. Eg the audio engine, the desktop shell, the window tiler,… So basically the things that make your apps and make them work.
Windows 11 has the ability to natively run XP software iirc because they don’t break the underlying systems, they rather extend them.
macOS in the other hand changes stuff all the time and if a developer doesn’t catch up with that, the next macOS release will break the software.