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!!!
As long as someone is willing and able to maintain it.
It’s open source. All the work is either done by volunteers or by corporate sponsors. If it’s worth it for you to keep a GPU from the 90s running on modern kernels and you can submit patches to keep up with API changes, then no reason to remove it. The problem isn’t that the hardware is old, it’s that people don’t have the time to do the maintenance
What do you think is reasonable?
As long as possible unless nobody uses it for cases that need any security (daily driver, server, enterprise etc). If you drop support, you are lazy and support ewaste creation. In some cases it can be too difficult to support it but “too difficult” has a lot of meanings most of which are wrong.
I think for me, a 10 year minimum seems reasonable.
That’s really not enough. GTX 1080 is an almost 10 years old card but it’s still very competitive. Most of my friends even use 750s or similar age hardware. And for software, any major updates just make it more enshittificated now lol.
In principal I don’t disagree.
Problem is supporting everything requires work and effort which isn’t funded by a corporation or anything
Hardware support is usually funded enough or has enough human resources for it not to be a big problem imo. It’s ok to drop 30 years old stuff that nobody uses but dropping something just because rich people have a few years newer hardware is bad.
Yeah entirely missing my point.
I think it should be supported for a decade and the open sourced so that it can be archived and maintained by those who care.
My current laptop is 9 years old, I recently replaced the heat paste and added new RAM. It should definitely be more than 10 years, as my laptop is totally usable for everyday tasks like
- playing music
- playing movies
- browsing the web
- Org-mode
My current laptop is 7 years old, and I Love It!
I still even play games with it. Not the newest stuff, but I have such a huge backlog of indies and not-so-new games that I could play for 15 years…
If someone told me this will be garbage in 3 years… I would hit them with the laptop. It’s a T470p, their skull is the part that would break.
As long as possible, as long as someone is using it, as long as someone can keep maintaining it.
If the main developer team can no longer maintain it then open-source it, put it in the public domain and set it free. Ditto for firmware and hardware documentation.
Companies oughta be forced to release all information they have on hardware they no longer maintain and disable any vendor-lock crap once warranty ends.
Yes hardware gets old and in the computer realm it usually means it’s rendered obsolete, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its uses.
I’d say more than 10 years now. Computers evolved a lot more between the 90s and the 00s than between the 00s and now, my old laptop is 10 years old and it’s still perfectly running linux, and I hope it will keep running for years.
The problem is more hardware obsolescence, it’s a Acer so every part of it is slowly falling apart (keyboard, screen, battery) and OEM parts are impossible to find after all those years. I guess this problem is less important for desktop.
@Courantdair @Lettuceeatlettuce
Running an Acer laptop that is 9-10 years old. Everything works fine, but last summer my harddrive crashed. 8 gb ram and 2 ssd disks on 2tb each. And it is running smooth. I also have no plans on getting a new computer.
I think it is the kids who play hardware consuming games who drive the evolution of computers.
@Courantdair @Lettuceeatlettuce
Yeah one reason I’ve never cared for laptops.
I snipe used USFF ultra small form factor machines off eBay…nice being able to eventually scale into new upgrades, swap out original i3’s, for i5 or i7 when I see good deals.
Although my main PC, the mechanical keyboard started to have issues…parts just arrived today so I can repair it \0/ glad I’m not roped into some laptop to try to maintain again.
I do not think that can be determined in the tech space with ‘age’ alone. Popularity, usability and performance are much more important factors.
It was already brought up in another comment, the gtx 1000th gen, is a nice example. The gtx 1080 is after 8 years still a valid GPU to use in gaming and the 1050 a nice little efficient cheap video encode engine which supports almost all modern widespread codecs and settings (except AV1).
I would say for as long as the hardware remains useful. A high end laptop may still be perfectly usable in 15 years if the hardware doesn’t fail by then.
Still using a 5 year old laptop with no degradation in performance and expecting at least another 5. All I had to do was uninstall some malware that was eating up all the system resources and popping up a bunch of ads. It was called Windows. :-D
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
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.
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.
There’s a good argument for more modular kernels (microkernels and such). That way the driver could be kept going for decades, only updating the IPC protocol as the microkernel changes through time
Isn’t the linux kernel modular already? It does has modules… which drivers can be, although they tend to be in-kernel.
support should drop when we hit the sweat spot where the energy saving from running modern RISC devices over old CISC outweighs the energy cost of manufacturing replacements.
Usually, my computers dropped in performance after around 10 years. They might contain parts that are a few years older by that time. So, to be able to use them further, I would suggest a minimum of 15 years.
Good point. If I know it’ll meet my needs, I’m sometimes inclined to buy tech that’s a few years old, especially if the newer version just adds cloud, AI, or something else I don’t want/need. In many cases it’s still marketed the same so I think end of support dates should be clearly marked on the product itself so the consumer can make an informed choice. Intentionally bricking a device should be treated as littering and the company should be responsible for disposal fees.
Linux is a different story because of the volunteer presence. If anything Linux should get subsidies for keeping e-waste out of landfills after the manufacturer has long abandoned the product.
My laptop is about 5 years old now and still runs as fast as the day I bought it, if not faster. I replaced the battery twice, but this thing could go another 5-10 years if I don’t drop it or spill something on it.
If anything Linux should get subsidies for keeping e-waste out of landfills
Great idea.
I think kde might be working on something like that, but Idk.
10 years is clearly not enough. I’d say 20 years but I clearly don’t know how much work is involved.
I also clearly think that preserving the history of technology isn’t given enough importance with games disappearing, OS’s being not useable anymore and stuff like this.
But Linux is clearly the good student here.
