On Sun, Dec 13, 2020 at 11:40:29AM -0500, Devops PK Carlisle LLC wrote:
Being philosophically opposed to throwing a good machine into a landfill, I tend to hang on to equipment for a long time. My play/experimentation and last-ditch backup box is a 10 year old laptop.
I hear that, but at least around here it's literally possible to grab machines that are less than 10 years old that are on their way to the landfill. So scratch your itch by saving a machine less than 10 years old, then throw the really old one away instead. I'm unconvinced that running a stable of unneeded old machines is either great from a waste standpoint or something that should dictate the direction of the project. Debian isn't devoted specifically to supporting functionally obsolete hardware indefinitely, and when obsolete hardware makes it hard to move forward we need to just drop it. There are other projects which do strive to support old hardware indefinitely, and I highly recommend looking at one of those if hardware you want to use is no longer supported by debian. I personally run netbsd on some of my nostalgia hardware, but there are other options that may work better for you depending on what you're trying to do.