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Comment by DoctorOetker | Hacker News Reader

I agree, the real problem is after (and in my opinion ethically also before) EOL, we can't sign new distro's and bootloaders...

All we need that is currently missing is for end-users to be able (by law) to sign their own boatloaders, by entering their own public key into the most minimal inspectable ring infimum bootloader...

Otherwise it's just a long and slow road towards either fab at home, or alternatively blind computation on the host, and encrypted communication with a minimal IO system attached to the host...

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I really agree on the user signed bootloader part. I think we should also have this for Android devices, since most Android devices only have two years of system/security update.

One should always be able to sign one's bootloader. If it's only 6.5 years later it can be that not even Linux support for that hardware would exist then?

> If it's only 6.5 years later it can be that not even Linux support for that hardware would exist then?

On the contrary; Linux continues to have pretty darn good support for hardware that's 10 or even 15 years old.

On the contrary, I have direct experience with more notebooks that disproves your claim.

Linux support for the hardware of the notebooks was never as good as Windows. Experienced users, to be sure that they won't have problem with hardware, tend to buy either Thinkpad or Dell notebooks. Everything else is a lottery. From three non-Dell, non-Thinkpad notebooks that I've bought since 2000 only one had enough hardware support to be even usable for more than five years.

Moreover, the first one, an AMD-based Sony (also not cheap) worked better under Linux under the versions which were less than 5 years old than the model's introduction. Only since that point the problems with the drawing on the screen became so bad that it was not usable at all for anything but being used headless. I was installing every new Ubuntu version every 6 months there, and the hardware support for the video card came to be progressively worse. I've reported the bug behavior but was never contacted to help the investigation, the bug was closed unsolved eventually.

Recently, only two months ago, my Dell notebook, 2 years old, after an update stopped working with an external monitor under kernel packed in the 18.04 LTS Ubuntu (where everything worked for a year before that). It took only days to fix that, but the bug was wide spread enough to strike most users of external monitors.

So no, Linux won't magically work on a machine which is not continuously directly tested by enough developers. It will also even less work after 6.5 years of machine's introduction, again, unless there was a constant work to keep it working. Linux is not a magic pixie dust, but a product by humans that also needs active contributions to even keep working with the old hardware.

> On the contrary, I have direct experience with more notebooks that disproves your claim.

On the contrary, I also have direct experience with notebooks across a wide variety of makes, models, and eras (though most were from the Windows XP era, since a lot of my Linux installs were from migrating folks off XP).

> Experienced users, to be sure that you won't have problem with hardware, tend to buy either Thinkpad or Dell notebooks.

Well yeah. That tends to hold true regardless of operating system. The laptops that still manage to be terrible on Linux (which in my experience is constantly shrinking, even - and especially - for old ones) - were typically worse under Windows.

> So no, Linux won't magically work on a machine which is not continuously directly tested by enough developers.

Of course not. My point is that once it is working, it's typically unlikely that it'll regress all that much unless there's an explicit push to deprecate old hardware. The old laptops ain't popular now, but that doesn't mean they weren't popular enough 10 years ago (or similar enough internals-wise to popular notebooks from 10 years ago) to end up getting enough attention by Linux driver devs to still be usable to this day. Maybe someday bitrot will set in, but my experience with Linux support on old laptops suggests that to be relatively rare.

> The laptops that still manage to be terrible on Linux (which in my experience is constantly shrinking, even - and especially - for old ones) - were typically worse under Windows.

I gave already a direct counterexample, a Sony notebook. No problems under Windows for 10 years, unusable after 4-5 under newer Linux versions.

The example I haven't given: the Samsung notebook where touchpad never worked properly under Linux. The only response from community was "use an external mouse." Also the WIFi card on that Samsung never worked under Linux. Again the answer as "switch WiFi card or use an external one."

> once it is working, it's typically unlikely that it'll regress all that much unless there's an explicit push to deprecate old hardware.

For that I have 2 examples: Sony notebook graphic drivers regressed to make the notebook unusable. The Dell notebook regeressed with the LTS, it was fixed only because the bug stroke too much notebooks at once.

But hardware support does break in Linux unless enough of effort is made.

And some issues are totally broad. Last year I've bought a box with the APU which can't play videos under Linux without stuttering. No problem under Windows.

Nobody who claims that "Linux always works" seems to have an actual experience with notebooks which aren't intentionally pre-selected as "known to work." I don't know why would such claim be even controversial, it's widely known.

https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-laptop.html

"Wireless 802.11

Another hardware device may not work at all; if you do not pay attention to wireless devices. Most laptops comes with on-board 802.11 (a/b/g/N) wireless cards. Not all card supported so make sure you get Intel Pro series card such as 3945 or Atheros based cards. My advice is use Google to search for your driver or use specialized databases (a more or less complete listing of wireless devices with information about the chipset they are based on and whether or not they are supported in Linux) to search for your laptop card."

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Touchpad_Synaptics#Touc...

Not to mention the graphics problems even on the Dells:

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/8lbf4o/arch_gnom...

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1105528/ubuntu-18-04-video-s...

Who exactly are you arguing against here, who says that Linux always works? Your Samsung example is instructive here. One-off hardware that was never intended to run under Linux, never did and still doesn't. While you have had some frustrating experiences, the broad consensus, and my own experience, say that Linux tends to extend the useful life of older hardware.

For instance, I have a cheap asus notebook from the Windows 8 era. Windows 8 is EOL, so I upgraded it to Windows 10. Windows 10 takes literally half an hour to boot in the best case, which is after spending a whole day in the update-reboot loop, making sure the system is fully updated. (I do this every quarter or so.) So I dual boot Arch. Arch boots in 30 seconds.

And that's not to mention the stack of Thinkpads going back to 2002, all of which still work flawlessly. (But of course they work, because if Linux ever had a target laptop platform, it was 2000s era Thinkpads.)

> who says that Linux always works?

The whole context of this thread is me responding to the answers to my initial claim (still hard to read, so let me repeat):

> One should always be able to sign one's bootloader. If it's only 6.5 years later it can be that not even Linux support for that hardware would exist then?

And your response finally, the way I see it, confirms exactly that: if you have some notebook for which Linux can't be normally developed and maintained, after 6.5 years the Linux won't "magically work." Which is what I claimed from the start. Full 6.5 years after the introduction, it can remain a non-target. Not as a notebook, but as a set of hardware parts which aren't openly supported. Like all non-Dells and non-Thinkpads for years were, as you also confirm. Being able to install VMs before 6.5 years are over is also not enough.

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