A while back there was some debate about the Linux kernel dropping support for some very old GPUs. (I can’t remember the exact models, but they were roughly from the late 90’s)
It spurred a lot of discussion on how many years of hardware support is reasonable to expect.
I would like to hear y’alls views on this. What do you think is reasonable?
The fact that some people were mad that their 25 year old GPU wouldn’t be officially supported by the latest Linux kernel seemed pretty silly to me. At that point, the machine is a vintage piece of tech history. Valuable in its own right, and very cool to keep alive, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the devs to drop it after two and a half decades.
I think for me, a 10 year minimum seems reasonable.
And obviously, much of this work is for little to no pay, so love and gratitude to all the devs that help keep this incredible community and ecosystem alive!
And don’t forget to Pay for your free software!!!
the fact that it’s open and you can get old versions of the kernel. i say we are very lucky we get the support we get but ask long as that older version is still available abd opening means no e waste. even 386s
If there are no security updates, it does become ewaste because of severe vulnerability to all sorts of attacks that makes it unsuitable for most use cases. Though it’s still better than nothing.
It is not that simple.
For hardware attacks, older hardware are probably safe since the attacks are specifics to some newer features. I really doubt you can deliver a Spectre attack on anything up until the Pentium or even later.
On the software side, there could be some security bugs to which some older version could be vulnerable since there were not the vulnerable code at the time. Granted, there could be some security bugs that were not yet discovered in older codebase.
idk when you’re aware of that, you can airgap that ancient PC and have the system read only etc… it’s super slow anyways. it’s like museum level hardware without USB and like 16 or 32 MB RAM. you can play xbill and nethack on it, but it’s barely usable with modern software and hardware.
yeah that’s what I’m talking about it’s nice to be able to still run a windows 95 or OG redhat 6 distro on period hardware if nothing else for learning and museum.
people still do it today in the retro space all the time and it’s a hell of a lot harder to do on windows and Mac than Linux since every kernel is still archived. I mean am I that old to remember the 2.6 split. it’s not the same thing since that was maintained but it doesn’t mean someone in the retro space couldn’t do a back port if needed.
I was at VCF this year and people were still writing new code for PDP11s. it may not be productive in a work sense but preserving computing history is something of value and not ewaste.
I kinda disagree. If you need something to connect to the internet, it needs to be rather up to date.
for real work yeah but for getting to experience retro hardware https://protoweb.org/ works great. by no means am I advocating for any production data be used on these machines. but at the same time the code open if you want it bad enough. you do it yourself or pay a bounty to have some others do it. if you really want to use it for real work. like I said it’s great you don’t have to start from scratch the old version archive is there warts and all.
Or use a browser that’s so featureless that exploits don’t have anything to exploit, such as Lynx. The rest should be handled by any decent firewall in front of it.