Hacker News Reader

Comment by greatgib | Hacker News Reader

It's the end of an area, Linux used to be this thing that was running on quite anything and allowing to salvage old computers.

I think that there is a shitload of old desktop and laptop computers from 10 to 15 yrs that are still usable only with a linux distribution and that will not be true anymore.

Now Linux will be in the same lane as osx and windows running after the last shiny new things, and being like: if you want it, buy a new machine that will support it.

View on HN

You can still run an older kernel. There are the "Super-long-term support" releases that have 10+ year support cycles. Some distros may go even further.

If you install 6.12 today (via e.g. Debian 13) then you'll be good until at least 2035. So removing it now de-facto means it will be removed in >10 years.

And as the article explains, this mostly concerns pretty old systems. Are people running the latest kernel on those? Most of the time probably not. This is really not "running after the last shiny thing". That's just nonsensical extreme black/white thinking.

Won't these super old kernels basically turn into forks after some time that are maintained and even extended for special purposes?

From a developer's perspective, yes.

From a user's perspective, they just keep working.

That's assuming your old machines will never need to interface with new peripherals or new network protocols or new filesystems or anything that could require changes only found in newer kernels. It's not far removed from saying that Windows still supports them as well because you can always use Windows ME for the rest of the millennium.

Desktops and laptops from 10 to 15 years ago are basically all 64 bit. By the time this removal happens, we'll be at 20 years of almost all that hardware being 64 bit. By the time hardware becomes "retro", you don't need the latest kernel version.

Lots of distros already dropped 32 bit kernel support and it didn't cause much fuss.

20 years isn't all that much though. We maintain houses for much longer than that so why should we accept such low lifetimes for computers.

Because they're fundamentally different things? A house is a machine for providing weather protection. The difference between a modern house and an old one is pretty minor. A computer is a machine for doing calculations. The difference between a modern computer and an old one is - by more or less any metric you can think of - many orders of magnitude. Calculations per Watt, calculations per second, calculations per unit volume etc.

It's not even like we're breaking them. This is just the maintainers of the Linux kernel choosing to not spend their time maintaining compatibility with the old architectures.

You might still be able to install linux, just not with the latest kernel.

You can put in parts and effort to maintain older computers, but when you can buy a brand new desktop for $120 or a few year old one for $40 and they blow it out of the water on performance and power efficiency, what's the reason to do so? (I'm asking in the context of a main computer, not something to run old games natively or be nostalgic about.)

A computer you buy today will be much more viable in 20+ years than a 20+ year old computer is right now. We were still in the extreme part of speed and density growth back than, and it will lessen every decade.

One of the dumbest things I've heard today...

Houses are obviously very different to computers. Do you also demand 20 year lifetimes for your socks?

Ten- or fifteen-year-old hardware is still perfectly serviceable now for some modern applications. (The decade-long Intel monopoly drought of 5% generational improvements to CPU performance has a great deal to do with that.) So this is not as strong of an argument as the same sentence would be if it were said ten years ago.

It's a plenty strong statement because all that hardware and more is included, back to years before the drought. 64 bit support goes all the way back to some Pentium 4s, including all the dual core models.

I'm quite sure that still a few years after 2020 there were still atom or Celeron processors powered laptop that did not support 64 bits.

Maybe it is not that the architecture was not compatible as much as it was restricted or limited by Intel and co for these cpus

> I think that there is a shitload of old desktop and laptop computers from 10 to 15 yrs that are still usable only with a linux distribution and that will not be true anymore.

For mainstream laptops/desktops, the 32 bit era ended around 2006 (2003, if you were smart and using Athlon 64s instead of rancid Pentium 4).

Netbooks and other really weak devices held out a few years longer, but by 2010, almost everything new on the market, and a good chunk of the second-hand market, was already 64 bits.

In my experience, the 10-15 year old salvaged computer that still works okay with GNU/Linux is increasingly a 64 bit machine.

Case in point, I'm writing on a x86_64 laptop that was a free give away to me about a year ago with a CPU release year that is 2012.

I have personally given away a x86_64 desktop unit years ago that was even older, might have had DDR1 memory.

Circa 2013 my old company was gifted a x86_64 motherboard with DDR2 memory that ended up serving as our in-office server for many years. We maxed the RAM (8GB) and at some point bought a CPU upgrade on ebay that gave us hardware virtualization extensions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com