this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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How Long Should Hardware/Software Support Last? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 4 months ago by Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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!!!

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[–] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] gian@lemmy.grys.it 3 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] lurch@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

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.