TIL Linux does eventually drop support for old hardware.

It's more about maintainability than age.

Some ancient hardware which is still actively being used and which has plenty of maintainers willing to keep it up-to-date will stick around.

A driver of only a few years old with roughly zero drivers, no maintainers, and which forms an obstacle for other work? That'll be gone very quickly.

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shasheene an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm still sad that Linux dropped support for i486 and early-i586 CPUs.

And more disappointed that distributions especially Debian the "universal operating system" has dropped support for i586 already (and is dropping support for i686)

Open-source doesn't have the same pressures of commercial software from Apple or Microsoft. I really love the idea of obsessive, perfectionism approach of providing indefinite hardware support to obscure old hardware (but especially once-popular old hardware), with adequate automated testing suites to test ancient hardware.

Maybe with agentic AI coding we'll be able to expand support windows, and even bring back hardware support for older hardware.

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kelnos 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Open-source doesn't have the same pressures of commercial software from Apple or Microsoft.

Open source has a pressure that's often even more difficult to overcome: limited spare time from volunteer maintainers. Volunteers are usually drawn from the pool of users. There aren't many i586 users left, so the pool of volunteers is small enough that there's no one able or willing to maintain Debian for it.

If you're that disappointed, step up to maintain the i586 port! If you're unable or unwilling to do so, then you have your answer, generalized across all i586 enthusiasts, as to why they dropped support.

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bsimpson an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Real question though: who's gonna run a CI farm of old hardware? That sounds not-cheap and commercially untenable.

	▲	kelnos 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I imagine you don't need to; you can emulate i586 on x86_64, and it would probably be performant enough. But I suspect that's not really the hurdle: none of the existing Debian developers care enough about it to maintain it, and no one who cares about it enough about it is willing to maintain it.