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Comment by thetinguy | Hacker News Reader

I think 5 years of support is reasonable.

No.

Beside Android 5.x/6.x devices, I has Symbian 9.x (Nokia N82) smartphone which works perfectly. And there are a lot of new apps for it:

- https://old.reddit.com/r/symbian/new

P.S. My 10+ year-old laptop perfectly works with latest MX Linux distribution (based on Debian 10 buster) and all modern FLOSS desktop apps (GIMP, FreeCAD, Inkscape, etc.) works like a charm on it.

So, software devs should NOT declare users to buy/upgrade hardware.

So regardless the amount of work it involves and how few people use them, e.g. 6-year old devices should always be supported?

With PC the compatibility is quite a success story, but hardly the standard.

Phone manufacturers certainly ought to offer 5+ years of OS updates. Apple does, after all. So I agree with you to that extent.

But if users want third parties volunteers to support devices whose vendors have already dropped support? If there are no volunteers wanting to do the work, the work doesn't get done.

The bad guys here are the phone vendors, not the Termux developers IMHO.

> The bad guys here are the phone vendors, not the Termux developers IMHO.

Here is Termux devs reply to Termux user:

> ... Time to upgrade your devices...[0]

Who is bad guy here according this quote?

P.S. It would not be so bad if devs just says "we don't support such devices", but instead devs declared to upgrade device in reply to user...

[0] https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/1407#issuecommen...

I'm not seeing a problem there?

I mean, I'll admit its tone is quite direct - I guess they could have copy-pasted some corporate-speak about what a difficult decision it was and how very sorry they were about having to make it, instead of being so direct and unambiguous. But that's pretty trivial IMHO.

If you're committed to sticking with a really old phone and want to use Termux, you should switch to a custom ROM based on more modern Android. Android 5 and 6 are ancient at this point.

Now that just comes off as being written by someone who feels very entitled to the hard work of others.

If you feel so strongly about it, why don't you fork the project and continue integrating upstream features and fixes for those on pre 7.x devices? Or would that take too much of your own time to do?

It's an open source project. Feel free to pitch in, sponsor, or shut the fuck up .

> Feel free

And I feel free to tell my personal POV on this situation, as you and everyone else.

While i do not agree with the expectation that others should do work for free, 5 year support is really short when the devices work perfectly fine. Why contribute to e-waste and force people spend money they may not have when that isn't necessary?

5 years is okay for a phone, but once you subtract the time it takes for Android releases to get into new phones it can be a problem. Hopefully the manufacturer releases OS updates! Hopefully.

For an open source project, yes. There aren't enough people to really work and maintain this thing.

But in general, hell fucking no. 5 years is terribly short sighted. Look at how much e-waste is piling up. We can't really recycle phones. They get shipped to Asian and African countries where people melt down the plastic without adequate ventilation and extract out all the metals they can in OSHA free environments.

We should be designing things to be as useful as possible for as long as possible.

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