Hacker News Reader

Comment by AshamedCaptain | Hacker News Reader

Oh god. So after Windows drops support basically for any PC that is 4 years old, a Linux distribution entertains the idea to follow closely and drop support for any PC that is 10 years old? Is this corporate influence?

I cannot believe BIOS boot support is even close to the amount of code required for UEFI boot.

Before you say "UEFI is much older than 10 years old", please remember that UEFI only started being a default ever since Windows 8 (10 years old). Windows 7 can't even boot on UEFI (it requires BIOS emulation to be active). I have a system from 7 years ago that while it claims to have an UEFI BIOS, it is so full bugs it is unusable except to boot Windows. I mean, critical bugs, as in, you boot Linux with UEFI just once, you risk the UEFI var storage getting corrupted and the motherboard becoming a paperweight.

View on HN

Look, even if RHEL 10 gonna drop UEFI support maybe sometime in the future, there's gonna be some retro enthusiats who would happily fork it with BIOS support returned.

Also, why are you so focused with corporate decision of a distro that is obviously cattered for future devices?

"10 year old hardware" is retro ? Ivy Bridge is retro these days?

This hardware is not just usable, it is _perfectly usable_, up to the point you'd barely distinguish it Gnome-performance-wise from something from last year if you pair with an SSD (which is not so strange).

This is not a 486 with 4megs of RAM that requires a special DE. These are machines with many gigs of RAM that have graphic cards which are still better than some of today's low-end cards. If any change like this is ever accepted, drawing the support line at "10 year old hardware", it's going to be hard to ever again claim that Linux is good for the environment.

Yeah it's funny, my workstation is a 12yo HP-Z600 workstation upgraded for like 30$ to 2CPU's/16Cores and 47GB Ecc-Ram, and now someone tells me it's retro but it's still often faster than new Hardware.

You can use several GNU/Linux distros which support BIOSes, even libre ones.

I agree, and that's the strength of linux, but here's a slight devils advocate:

If someone is heavily invested into RH for their BIOS only infra, this could be an issue for them. I'm sure there's large operations that would need fixing up if these change happens.

Not that RH is obligated to cater fully to that crowed of course. But 10 years is a bit silly, especially with how expensive hardware is now due to covid.

All that said, it's not going to be an issue like everyone is making it out to be.

Individuals should have few problems forking mainline to keep BIOS support, and large organizations will be given amble time to upgrade (at least years. RH isn't stupid with it's corporate customers.)

RHEL has a 3 year cadence, so if (if) RHEL 10 makes this change it won't have been 10 years, it will have been 13 years.

Yes Fedora is "a distribution of linux". A distribution that is an upstream of an enterprise distribution. Why do you care if enterprise markets don't care about legacy support? Just use another distribution. That's one of the boons of linux.

honestly at some point we should think about deprecating old code old stuff and i think 10 years might not be such a bad number, of course good deprecation policy would tell you for few releases before that something will get removed but its linux so even if they said we are removing BIOS support in fedora 40 everyone would cry

also it takes about same amount of code to boot BIOS and UEFI

>a Linux distribution

I think it matters quite a lot that the distro in question is Fedora which is by design forward looking and kind of a testbed. They have been shipping Wayland as a default since 2016 when it still had countless of hardware and software problems. Part of the diversity of the linux ecosystem is that distros can be opinionated.

Yes. I mean if it was centos / alma or debian, I would be scared we enter into an era of discarting perfectly capable hardware, but Fedora has always been packed "with the lastest but stable enough".

I'm not a UEFI huge fan (I've use boot-repair a lot of times since its creation), but I can see why maintaining a legacy bootloader could be distracting.

Wayland! Ye gods. I tried. I really did. I understand that from a developer standpoint, it's the future. I understand from a security standpoint, it's more secure. From a user standpoint? It completely breaks so much functionality (copy / paste, screen share, blue light filters, etc). Video players crash and sometimes take down the whole OS with it. It puts so much responsibility that used to be the job of the x server off on the window managers.

This shift to wayland has been one of the most user hostile decisions I've seen. Every distro that defaults to wayland pushes me that much closer to simply running linux in a WSL container on windows.

Wayland has changed since you last tried. I haven't got copy paste or blue light issues with it since Fedora 35 went with Wayland-by-default. Screen share is iffy on Electron, but that behemoth is slow to pick up new technologies.

I don't know about video players crashing either.

When talking about a fast moving new piece of technology, it's good to give it a try once in a while and not let your 4 year old experience colour your judgement.

I gave up last week. Vlc and celluloid were crashing under gnome. They worked under swaywm but couldn't find a way to install a redshift wayland clone that worked. There are a whole lot of things that still simply 'don't work' especially if you venture outside of gnome and kde.

VLC doesn’t support wayland. It’s an X application.

take a look at https://arewewaylandyet.com/ to find some alternative app for your X-only software

Also make sure to alias vlc to your new alternative, i keep forgetting i don’t have vlc installed anymore...

I tired using celluloid which is a gnome wrapper around mpv, but it stopped working. Running it on the command line, I'm prompted with an exception and admonished that wayland support is 'experimental' and known to be unstable.

I use celluloid on Wayland. Never crashed. It'd be helpful to know what distro you are using. Fedora has the best Wayland experience of them all, others not so much.

You wouldn't have a nice Wayland experience on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for example.

>You wouldn't have a nice Wayland experience on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for example.

That's a bingo! :^(

Looking to move to an arch flavor, but need to figure out how to backup ~ 500GB of stuff I don't want to lose.

If you were using GNOME, then it has a redshift clone built in.

Yes, gnome has night light, but unfortunately vlc crashes under wayland and it takes the entire OS with it. I haven't discovered any smoking guns, but I assume it's some sort of OOM issue, which is funny on a system with 8GB of ram.

Switching to gnome on xorg, it's rock solid stable.

I will wait to switch back to wayland when I'm forced to a few years down the line. I'm done bleeding on the edge.

> vlc crashes under wayland and it takes the entire OS with it. I haven't discovered any smoking guns, but I assume it's some sort of OOM issue

As someone already pointed out, VLC doesn't support wayland natively, so it's running under Xwayland. Ironically the issue could very well be X related.

It's Red Hat, they dropped their support for community based linux. Why wouldn't they also drop support for old hardware.

That's not true... CentOS Stream is more of a "community" than CentOS was. If you had a bug in CentOS all you can do is file an issue in the Red Hat bug tracker and wait because there was no way to contribute.

With Stream it's open to not just bugfixes but community-contributed enhancements.

The three businesses I knew that used CentOS, aren't anymore. They're looking for alternatives. They didn't pick CentOS because it was cutting edge. They wanted a stable environment that wouldn't change.

"Is this corporate influence?"

Of course? Fedora Linux is an asset of the company Red Hat, their prevailing revenue model seems to have something to do with adding their own brand of complexity to otherwise simple open source systems, see systemd.

Since its acquisition by IBM (NYSE:IBM), Red Hat has entered the conglomerate of publicly owned companies, their profits are linked together with other public hardware manufacturers like Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), through intraday traders and index funds.

In summary, removing support for older hardware increases sale of new hardware, hardware and software companies coordinate profit sharing through stock markets. Pretty simple.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com