Re: Reaching Richard (Was: Towards a Debian for minimalists)

Jonas:
            The following news item from Distrowatch Weekly issue 660. 9 May 2016, together with with news items about various distros dropping support for 32 bit systems, seems to have gotten mixed up in my mind. However 586 class computers are still in use and perfectly usable for a fair number of people.

          The Debian project supports a wide range of hardware architectures, including 32-bit x86 CPUs. Changes are happening in Debian's development branches which will make older versions of the 32-bit architecture obsolete. Ben Hutchings provides the details: "Last year it was decided to increase the minimum CPU features for the i386 architecture to 686-class in the Stretch release cycle. This means dropping support for 586-class and hybrid 586/686 processors. (Support for 486-class processors was dropped, somewhat accidentally, in Squeeze.) This was implemented in the Linux kernel packages starting with Linux 4.3, which was uploaded to Unstable in December last year. In case you missed that change, GCC for i386 has recently been changed to target 686-class processors and is generating code that will crash on other processors. Any such systems still running Testing or Unstable will need to be switched to run Stable (Jessie)." A list of processors which will no longer be supported after Debian "Jessie" can be found in Hutchings' mailing list post.

My thoughts on this topic are (I am excluding most of Northern Europe & North America in this)

Older Computers are being made un-usable for want of an available OS, contributing to E-waste,forced upgrades to newer hardware,           unnecessary expenditure (etc).

Linux distros are getting bigger and bigger (bloated?) making it more difficult to download an iso. In spite of extensive use of cell phones, people in developing countries still depend on land lines and poor ISP services for some of the computer needs.

I would also guess that more than 50% of the users, of any distro, do not use all (or most) of the bells and whistles provided with the distro. Even the eye-candy is ignored after a few days but it still uses the resources.

Free software is not all that free if it requires new hardware "with every new version :-)"

Perhaps you could tell us about the types of hardware you saw being used in India/Nepal. I am wondering about the ordinary people, not the wealthy.

regards
harsha godavari

From: "Jonas Smedegaard" <dr@jones.dk>
To: debian-blends@lists.debian.org
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2016 12:02:32 AM
Subject: Re: Fwd: Reaching Richard (Was: Towards a Debian for minimalists)

Hi Harsha,

Quoting Harsha Godavari (2016-07-15 00:55:04)
> My needs are well served by something like Luit Linux ( abandoned long
> ago) running on a genuine i486 or an early pentium with a non-PAE CPU.