On Wed May 31, 2023 at 12:44 PM CEST, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 12:51:06AM +0200, Diederik de Haas wrote: > > While it may be a no-brainer for a person with a $/€ 1000 a month residual > > income to just buy new hardware whenever they feel like it, that is not the > > case for everyone. > [...] > > It's absolutely true that modern machines are more energy efficient. What is > > also true is that the production of new devices has a big environmental > > impact. > > 20+ year old machines are typically more power hungry, more expensive, > less performant, and less reliable than an up-to-date raspberry pi. If > you want to support people who can't afford shiny new hardware, I think > pointing them to raspberry pi-class hardware is a better idea than I have worked to improve support for Pine64 devices (too), so that people who can afford it, can buy power-efficient SBCs (instead of horrible RPi's where the non-free firmware is the least of their sins). My point is: what about people who don't have the option to *buy* anything (new or used), for financial, logistical or other reasons? I've been keeping an eye on developments in the upstream linux kernel and saw there was a 'spring cleaning' (i.e. removal of old HW support). Reading through the commit messages, I noticed 2 criteria for removal: - Code has (effectively) been unmaintained for MANY years - The maintainers have not seen any indication for several years that ANYONE is actually using that hardware. I think those are very reasonable criteria. In my initial reply I quoted someone who EXPLICITLY said there were people who actually used those i386 devices. On the kernel team I've an actual valid argument why supporting i386 hardware is *difficult* as they don't have the HW (themselves) to reproduce an i386-specific issue or to test a potential fix for that. In the responses here, I've mostly seen the *assumption* that those old devices must be power hungry. While I'm quite sure modern hardware is more power *efficient*, that doesn't mean old hardware is thus power hungry. But most of all, I'm flabbergasted/annoyed that someone who made explicit and clear what they need, namely keeping support for i386, a bunch of people feel the need to respond like "Well, actually, you need this (other thing)". I find that extremely condescending. Maybe it's an option to answer the ACTUAL question? (and that answer could be 'no') > I don't think "but old hardware is still used" is a very good argument > for keeping i386 around. I think that's actually an excellent reason. I've likely missed prior discussions around this subject, but I haven't seen and can't think of the reasons why so many people seem so adament to get rid of i386 ASAP. Assuming there are indeed valid reasons to get rid of i386, I think it would be a far better plan to announce that **Trixie** will be the last release that will support i386. That way people who care about i386 have a full development cycle to make i386 the best it can be for as long as they can still use that HW. Maybe they can also make arrangements with CIP to designate the Trixie kernel as a Super Long Term Support kernel release. But tackling on the release notes at the very last moment that Bookworm will be the last supported release, seems not so 'nice' IMO. Cheers, Diederik
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