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Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers

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Re: Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers

#21

Post by colejohnson66 »

Tepix wrote: post #14
nbsande wrote: post #5

Keeping support for near 20 year old consumer grade machines in the kernel seems ridiculous to me. Doing so would bloat the size of the kernel even more than it already is. The more code you have the easier it is for bugs and vulnerabilities to creep in. When people write articles about moving old computers to windows to Linux they generally don't mean 20 year machines. You wouldn't even be able to run a modern brows…

Most of the hardware specific code is in loadable kernel modules, they increase the code size but not the system requirements.

Yes, but those modules need to be maintained as the kernel is updated. If a specific architecture’s tree is abandoned, it would make sense to remove it from the tree until someone picks it up again.

Re: Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers

#22

Post by sokoloff »

> The time has come to stop building obsolescence into our computers and make the small effort required to provide user-friendly distributions of Linux that support near-vintage computers.

I look forward to seeing the author’s low-resource Linux distribution; since they’ve identified that as a small-effort task, I expect it won’t take them long to ship it.

Re: Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers

#25

Post by anthk »

creshal wrote: post #19
elmerfud wrote: post #3

This article strikes me largely as, someone else should be doing this for me so I can benefit from their hard work. It's as if they miss the point of Linux, free software, etc... This problem exists because people, like this author, who are in to vintage systems aren't taking up the mantle to maintain a distribution to support their old systems. It's like they want the benefit with zero effort. Become a leader, start…

OP first needs to decide what the actual problem is they want to solve. > Either they are filled with bugs, refuse to install on my computer's hard drive, require too much RAM, run too slowly, lack important drivers or codecs, are no longer actively supported, do not support 32-bit CPU's, are too difficult for novices to use, or have other highly-annoying problems like, for example, poor use of swap space. Most of th…

>I also found that I was able to play 480p Youtube videos in full-screen mode and listen to music on Pandora.

Holy shit, he/she is very uninformed. Pandora plays perfectly with some CLI player (I can't remember it's name), and for youtube damn mpv with youtube-dl (my config for my trash machine) will play any 720p video fast as hell.

~/.config/mpv/config:

    vo=gpu,drm
    sws-fast=yes
    sws-allow-zimg=no
    zimg-dither=no
    vd-lavc-skiploopfilter=all

Re: Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers

#27

Post by anilakar »

I could probably make a Linux desktop distribution run smoothly on pretty much all the legacy hardware I haven't thrown away in fifteen years. That does not make said hardware useful, because every time I had to upgrade was due to web browsing getting slower and slower.

Edit: Quite a few other folks in this comment section seem to have pointed out basically the same thing.

Re: Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers

#28

Post by anthk »

pjc50 wrote: post #23

My Toshiba Libretto 30 still runs Linux fine .. with the version of Slackware I installed on it 20 years ago. Retro OS for retro computing. Connecting it to the internet would be another matter.

Try Delicate Linux. It's archived, but the CD still has the full repo on it.

http://delicate-linux.net/

As I'm learning Cobol (banking), and Forth with 4th, that machine would be really useful to me in 2021. As for gaming, slashem will run on that for sure, and IF games run on anything with a 386/68020 and beyond.

Re: Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers

#29

Post by bumbada »

>But, given that Linux is a community-supported operating system that does not need to make a profit, I see no valid reason for it not supporting every computer that can still be useful.

In other words, because it is a community project made by volunteers that earn nothing, there is no valid reason not to demand more unpaid work.

>In a more enlightened society, all products would be supported for as long as they remain useful. The time has come to stop building obsolescence into our computers and make the small effort required to provide user-friendly distributions of Linux that support near-vintage computers.

The only reason this person believes it is a "small effort" is because she has never ever remotely helped doing the effort herself.

I have made such effort myself. I have been part of Linux user groups and helped lots of people. I have experienced myself what is helping enormously someone for only this person demanding more free work and time just because I have already given her free work and time.

We have given talks in the University: If you want to install Linux do research when you buy a computer so it has compatible components because life is much easier and then the same people attending buying incompatible hardware and demanding us to fix it for them, so she could do the classes ' assignments, because that's what we "enjoyed doing".

Re: Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers

#30

Post by mschuster91 »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #21
Tepix wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the hardware specific code is in loadable kernel modules, they increase the code size but not the system requirements.

Yes, but those modules need to be maintained as the kernel is updated. If a specific architecture’s tree is abandoned, it would make sense to remove it from the tree until someone picks it up again.

The problem: once something is removed from the tree, it is almost impossible to get it back in, since whoever wants to do that has to replay the extreme amounts of refactorings done since the removal.

The Linux kernel famously only guarantees outside stability of interfaces, but in-kernel interfaces are regularly changed - one might suspect intentionally, to make the lives of people doing off-kernel work (such as graphics card drivers) as difficult as possible so that they will eventually open source their code and ship it in the kernel.

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