> I wrote an article a while ago that was critical of Linux developers who refuse to maintain distributions that run on computers that are more than about 15 years old.
> Some developers said I should just create my own Linux distribution. I would love to. Unfortunately, that is out of the question for a couple of reasons. First, I just don't have the time. I am too busy...
There's a certain lack of self-awareness in this article.
Maybe don't be critical of open-source developers for not supporting your ancient hardware, when you lack the capability to do so yourself?
This is the point. This constant barrage of questionable breaking changes cause _everyone_ to need to increase the time they spend on useless maintenance. As a consequence, people decide not do it, and stop supporting applications on the Linux desktop.
We are literally asking that you stop doing these changes. It's unfair to ask of developers that since you are spending time breaking their applications, developers should spend time following your breaking changes. Please stop breaking our applications.
I'm 39. I guess that extra year makes a difference?
15 years ago is 2009. CNET's recommended laptop of that year runs at less than 1/10th the performance of current MacBook Air, with an integrated GPU that is 1/100th the speed of a current generation discrete laptop GPU. Oh, and it has almost double the wattage, and probably atrocious battery life by now. A raspberry pi is twice as fast, at a fraction of the energy usage.
The cheapest, throwaway windows netbook you can buy today would give you better performance and better energy usage, not to mention increased RAM and storage, and the energy savings would pay for the device in less than a year.
So no, I really don't see why we need continued software support for 15-year old hardware.
Because the cost of building a new device uses far more resources than just keeping an old laptop alive with a lightweight distro. My GF's ~14yo laptop (Celeron, 2GB, GL 2.1 Intel iGPU) with an SSD still works really fast with Ungoogled Chromium, a deblobbed Slackware and XFCE, even faster than her friends Windows 11 modern laptop with a much better processor and RAM.
"Resources" is quite broad. Objectively the cost of consumed resources is baked into the price, which as I've mentioned is paid back over a few years in energy savings, without even considering offsets due to recycling the old device. But I assume you mean externalities, which are harder to quantify.
I'll use CO2 as a stand-in. Your average laptop generates ~300 kg of CO2 during its full-lifecycle production. That includes refining of materials, electricity used in manufacturing, etc. As mentioned, in 15 years laptop energy usage has gone down about 1/2 to 1/3 of its prior levels, due to a lower baseline power usage and better standby modes. Assuming 8 hours of use per day of a 100W laptop (for round numbers), that ends up being about 300 kWh per year. Which in the USA on average ends up being about 300 lbs of CO2. So in 4 years its lower energy usage has saved more CO2 than was emitted in the manufacture of the new laptop.
Replacing old hardware is good for the environment.
you're making a logical error. The CO2 is cumulative.
So in case of replacing an inefficient laptop with a more efficient one:
manufacturing: 300kg
use 4 years: 400kg
manufacturing new laptop: 300kg
new laptop 4 years: 300kg
That's 2 laptops, 8 years of use: 1300kg
only using the inefficient laptop:
manufacturing: 300kg
4 years of use: 400kg
4 years of use: 400kg
one inefficient laptop after 8 years: 1100kg.
Even if both examples would have the same co2 output, it would still be more environmental to keep using the inefficient laptop, because the act of buying stuff and throwing away old stuff carries costs too. An obvious example is that if people would replace their laptops twice as often, then the world would need twice the amount of laptop factories, twice the amount of resources, twice the amount of laptop recycling stations, twice the amount of space in landfills for laptops, etc.
Maintaining and reusing old hardware is good for the environment
Single core CPU clock speeds haven't improved, but performance per core has still improved due to micro architectural improvements: more cache, better pipelining, more execution units, etc.
Interesting perspective. I'm 43. 15 years ago, Obama was a week away from being inaugurated. I was still in the Army. I hadn't met my wife yet. I can't think of a single thing I own today that I owned then. Forget computing devices. Not even the same house or same car or any clothes. My oldest cat is close. I got her Christmas 2009. Feels like an entirely differently lifetime. Hell, the first mobile phone I ever owned at all was 2007. The first laptop I ever owned was 2003. Nothing about that decade feels like "a couple years ago" other than pop culture. Apparently Taylor Swift had the top selling album of 2009. I'm pretty sure she's still popular.
I guess it's an interesting cutoff. I bought my first house in 2010, so a lot of household things from then are things I still own. Shovels and ladders and what not. Certainly not telecommunications and computing devices, though. There has been way too much upheaval and change in protocols and hardware capabilities since then. Possibly no electronics at all? I think all the circuit breakers and outlets in my house are different than then. I suppose flashlights work basically the same.
last job had server 2003 and HP-UX all over the place.
admittedly in an air-gapped / local-to-the-facility SCADA sense, but we were supporting server 2003 in 2021. were able to get rid of several of them during COVID, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is still one or two orphan 2003 boxes around...
> Linux developers who refuse to maintain distributions that run on computers that are more than about 15 years old.
I for one like to express my gratitude to this unnamed hero.
(I ought to be careful with my words as I actually have an Sandy-Bridge based server, but really expecting software updates on such elderly hardware is nuts as would be to expose it to the Internet)
I thought exactly the same (lack of self-awareness), only instead of "lack the capability" I though "lack of time".
Not every distro has to support old hardware (since the maintainers have limited time to work on it themselves, or whatever other reason they choose), I'm sure there are distros around that do.
>Most of these versions can no longer be found anywhere on the Internet. If you did not have the foresight to save them, you no longer have access to them. As far as you are concerned, they are gone forever.
I don't particularly care about ancient Linux ISOs, but I bet they're some of the best archived files on the internet.
And beyond that, the hobbyist archivists are on top of that. Many people act on the joke that their torrents are all Linux isos, and the other hoarders are going to save things they use like a Linux iso.
Hell, I'd bet every one listed is on the internet archive. And if not, the author could quickly fix the issue.
This went from "these ISOs are impossible to find" to "ok, but the packages are impossible to find" to "yeah, but they're not in the regular repos anymore."
If you want to do something unusual, you should expect to jump through a few hoops.
There are plenty of sites with old distros. I would like to point out oldlinux.org, because of the easy to remember domain and a smallish, but nice collection. Not a least it has Slackware 1.1.2, which will always have a special place in my heart.
You are going to find way more software for Linux to make your computer practically useful and pretty much all information out there is for Linux, so unless you have a reason to explicitly prefer BSD, it is much better to install Linux than any of the BSDs.
In fact chances are Linux will support your old hardware better than most, if not all, BSDs.
OpenBSD might work accidentally, but NetBSD intentionally supports old hardware.
Now why someone wants to run current software on museum-piece hardware is quite beyond me though.
So does Linux (486SX is the minimum supported CPU), there is nothing inherent to NetBSD about supporting old hardware than the developers wanting to do so.
> Now why someone wants to run current software on museum-piece hardware is quite beyond me though.
I can think a lot of reasons, e.g. keeping them useful. While there are many things that old hardware cannot do, there are things it can do as long as there is software to provide the functionality.
AFAICT the article isn't asking writing new software that runs on the old hardware, it is asking to let existing software that could run on the old hardware remain accessible.
There are multiple reasons to use Linux, probably as many as Linux users. The author believes everybody is like him and is not.
Over time all software becomes bloated as it is cheaper to buy hardware than pay developers. In the past paying people was worth it because you could do with cheap machines what only very expensive machines could do. Now cheap machines are very powerful.
In the Open source Arena it is also way cheaper in things that are not money: People are doing it in their free time and they do not want to pay with their free time nasty bugs as a result of writing low level instead of high level, functional and so on.
People must not forget that writing low level code, like in the past, is way more efficient but comes at a huge price: nasty bugs that are psychologically very taxing for a developer. Huge delays and overcosts.
As a company we write functional programming/high level code that is from 20 times to 100x more inefficient than what we could get with low level programming. We ship it anyway because:
1. It works and it is good enough.
2. Nobody will notice the difference and pay us for the enormous amount of work that will take to do it low level.
There are things in which we do very low level programming, but it gives us an edge over the competition, and someone pays for the work done.
Are modern Linux distros really that hard to get running on older systems? What'd be the main issues?
I don't really get the complain of TFA: IIUC it's not that Linux, the kernel, doesn't support 15 years+ old hardware but that some software that used to be shipped aren't shipped anymore by default, and so the only way to get these running is to compile them from source, which is not always possible due to missing repositories?
I still have my 386 and 486 somewhere: can't I install, say, a modern Debian on these?
> Most of these versions can no longer be found anywhere on the Internet. If you did not have the foresight to save them, you no longer have access to them. As far as you are concerned, they are gone forever.
Darn... I threw a lot of these away recently (old CDs with early Linux ISOs). Even much older stuff. Are these really gone forever? There has to be some data hoarders keeping them no? I'll be careful if I find older CDs: I may rip them and store them on a BluRay for another 50 years (not kidding).
> I still have my 386 and 486 somewhere: can't I install, say, a modern Debian on these?
Unlikely. Note that while Debian has a "i386" distribution, it actually targets at least a Pentium Pro. The 32-bit Intel architecture release ought to be labeled i586, but that ship has sailed.
> I still have my 386 and 486 somewhere: can't I install, say, a modern Debian on these?
As others already said - no.
And even if you find the one what would install... 5 years ago I installed Centos8 on x301. Despite having an SSD (I replaced it while 1.8" were still sold) it's completely unusable in Gnome. Yet it run fine under Windows 10. So...
> Even much older stuff. Are these really gone forever?
Quick search usually yields the results if the CD/ISOs are still available. Otherwise you can check archive.org, r/datahoarders
Gnome is very much using the GPU for rendering its GUI. They chose a tradeoff to work well on new systems.
But using something like Windowmaker, Icewm, Blackbox, Openbox should be fine. Xfce, Lxde and other lighter desktops might work too. Also, there is still Enlightenment 16 and also e17.
#1 Linux support for old hardware in general is incredibly good, better then any other modern OS AFAIK.
#2 Running a 15 year old Laptop makes zero sense, you can not be that poor. I use gaming rigs as my PCs for everything and I one of mine was 8 years old at some point and I still sold it for 250€ and bought a new one. There are budget laptops that run faster, eat less power bill that any 15 year old device. Of the specifics of your device do not play will with distros its just another good reason on the top of the list why an upgrade is past time.
Demanding devs to maintain stuff for 15 year old hardware makes no sense, if something is there and still works and can be "maintained" with little effort while keeping it in place its another story.
But again generally speaking I think Linux, the kernel has incredibly good support for an insane amount of obscure and ancient hardware out there.
> One significant problem exists for all of the above Linux ISO's. They only contain the applications that actually come in the ISO files.
Fedora and other larger distributions, especially those of 15 years ago, stand out brightly in my memory as distributions which offered full package management through DVDs and CDs. Fedora and Mandrake distributed something like six CDs back when I was a teenager, all full of RPMs.
"...tried and failed multiple times to install it onto the Precision M20's "hard drive" (actually a micoSD card on an IDE-to-microSD-card adapter). Every time, the installation looked successful. I even checked it with Gparted, which showed that the partition had been created, made bootable, and data had been written to it. Then, when I rebooted, no partition existed!"
Some MicroSD cards fail in a "Read Only" mode where they pretend to accept new data, but don't actually write anything.
Yes, the monster what allowed every housewife to use a computer without obtaining a CS degree first.
Which paved the way for the residential Internet demand and in turn allowed the smartphone revolution.
> I have been saving Linux ISO's for more than fifteen years
Lists ISO for the previous Debian and Ubuntu. Sure, Zenlive is old, but why even mention almost modern and the most popular distros?
> Unfortunately, they cannot be installed years later because the repositories generally no longer exist!
Yes, this is a problem with any OS with network repos as the default source. It's way easier (most of the time) on 'that monster' because the program installers are self contained.
But this guy's method of backing up is... let's say unconventional.
> Perhaps a reader will point out a better method in the comments below
Whatever it could be for the OSes with the repositories? The world wonders.
>> Unfortunately, they cannot be installed years later because the repositories generally no longer exist!
> Yes, this is a problem with any OS with network repos as the default source. It's way easier (most of the time) on 'that monster' because the program installers are self contained.
Not disagreeing, just adding some notes from memory :)
So, linux distros like SUSE used to be several CD:s containing the entire repository, and yet more CD:s with the src packages.
You normally would just use the first cd to install a base system, and then connect it to the online package repository.
The installation even set up the package manager with the cdimage as source and you would have to edit the package manager config in order to even get updates over the internet.
I bought a 3-4 DVD set of Debian Sarge with near everything. Most of the commenters (and the blog poster) have absolutely no clue on how GNU/Linux was shipped before Ubuntu, or even the Debian CD archive, or the Slackware ISO dumps + full repo backups, there are even packages from Alienbob for older releases.
- supporting old hw with modern software tend to be pointless, let's say you can found anything compiled for the relevant arch, you got a WM and a set of app deployed flawlessly, then? A modern web-app + a modern WebVM improperly named browser for legacy reasons it's simply way too heavy for the iron. Specially for the graphic part, and most of today's activities happen on web-apps demanding modern WebVM. Oh, of course you can write your thesis in LaTeX, but not with Zotero, you can run Emacs, but it will be painfully slow and so on. You can use the machine as a homeserver for stuff who do not demand much BUT that's means consuming much more energy than a modern raspi for similar performances... In the end it's just about showing old hw and something running on it;
- in the aforementioned terms all you need is just an old ISO image packaged with as much as software of that time you can, it's relatively doable, but it waste resources just to show an old system, without practical usage, it's normal most distros do not support such scenarios, it's more about some heritage foundations...
Now the part I agree:
- most modern OSes, not just GNU/Linux are designed for another era, not a modern one, but a very ancient one, I mean in 2024 decades after the first release of NixOS or Guix system having classical installers who take care of partitioning than spreading some archives on a fs tree it's absurd. A archaic design from the '80s;
- most modern package managers are born after the '80s, but they lag behind '80s tech. They are just archives of files to be spread in a tree. Having something that better map source and binaries crafting a system in code it's very needed and missed on most current OSes;
- most file systems are archaic, we need to go past beyond files and directories and even if in the past some have done so, like to a certain extent BeOS, we still have even users who manage their information in files & folders.
The above aspects are not much interested for keep up old iron but to evolve in modern time, actual state of tech is TERRIBLE for the actual state of possible tech we have.
Who cares if they are ancient; they work with ease and they are easy to set up and backup, something the gen-z misses terribily and fails to understand over and over reinventing the wheel.
- you can't know their current state, since anything is deployed one command at a time, and then other commands to upgrade and so on, while OSes like NixOS/Guix Systems are just a network of symlinks rebuilt from a config upon any change;
- you can't replicate them from scratch, even if you automate, no matter if Ansible/Salt, homegrown scripts, fog or something else, a proper replication demand a gazzilion of things to be manually prepared from a custom ISO or the current official ISO + all you change and you need to keep anything up, again NixOS/Guix System replicate from the config and making a custom ISO as a helper is just few lines of the very same language config;
- classic package manager badly accept user modifications, something have done for sources (FreeBSD ports, Gentoo/make.conf and so on) but essentially nothing for binaries, just some rigid and limited automation by Debian with "alternatives" and "configure", again a nightmare to get something custom;
- backups? There is NO DAMN REASON to backup an OS, data of course, no matter if homes or /var stuff BUT definitively not an OS, it must be reconstruct and frequently since anything derive more or less quickly and to be reliable you need to been able to replicate with the minimum effort.
Just try to compare a NixOS/NixOps managed infra vs a RH/kickstarted or Debian/Preseeded one). Gen-Z probably do not even know what's a file https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc... but that's a totally different matter, classic systems including current commercial big ones are archaic crap.
Slackware mirrors often had full repos and cd sets from 1.0 to the current one.
On runing modern software:
- guix for GNU libre supporters like me, albeit it's slower and it might not be supported,
but it can be installed by hand.
- pkgsrc. Yes, you can use pkgsrc under GNU/Linux.
Or better, hyperbola GNU will maybe run under a Pentium IV with SSE2 and, with care, under a Pentium II-III with IceWM, Rox and a cli/TUI based setup except for sxiv, dillo and mplayer.
Slackware goes back all the way to Slackware-1.01.
I'd say that slackware versions 8 to 10 would be about the right vintage for your machines.
Yes those versions are old, but the packages worked then and they will work now.
I think that what the OP actually wants is a Boeing 747 powered by a rotary aircraft engine from WW1. And that's a completely different barrel of fish.
Yes, this is one of a few reasons why I've begun the effort to shift away from Linux entirely. Sadly, the Linux ecosystem keeps evolving in a way that makes it less useful and desirable to me.
> Those who would like more details about the growing dysfunctionality of Linux and why it is the way it is may want to watch this YouTube video.
Some context before I give my perspective: I've been using Linux since before the 2010s, I ran Arch Linux for about 7 years solid, and I've used probably about 100 or 200 distributions in total (I'm an ex-distrohopper). For a 2 or 3 year stretch I used Alpine Linux and compiled most things from source. I keep "old" hardware about (I have a trusty X200 in the corner as I'm typing this), but have contact with baby boomers and do technical support from them sometime.
From my perspective, Linux is the strongest it's ever been. The joke of "X is the year of Linux on the desktop" is evergreen, but actually seems to be approaching true. I can literally pick a random top-10 distribution, install it for someone, and the likelihood of them encountering major breaking bugs in wifi drivers, sound, graphics cards, etc. is vanishingly low and getting lower by the year -- which is shocking given how regular these things were even as late as 2018. In terms of compatibility and usability Linux is probably the strongest it's ever been. The decades long joke that was Pulseaudio has been replaced with a solid system. Most of the graphics driver weirdness that was the 2010s has been fixed through the efforts of the mesa team with help from Valve's Big Pockets.
> Linux developers' responses clearly show that Linux is no longer an operating system for computer hobbyists who want to keep their beloved vintage or near-vintage computers alive. Instead, it has become an operating system that developers see as a way of boosting their careers.
I think this is an incredibly specific perspective that is ignorant of... the majority of users. Sure, in the late 2000s Linux was seen (by Windows users mainly) as nothing more than a system that you'd slap on a shitty old computer to keep it working. But from the start Linux was never actually intended to be relegated to that position, and much of the actual developer and userbase was and has been driven by corporate interest in Linux-on-the-Server and, more recently, Valve's Linux-on-the-Handheld. Linux tends to be flexible to be a "what you make of it", but that has ALWAYS involved someone actually putting in the effort and time and energy (and often money) to make it into that. It's not really OP's fault if there are no good modern distributions to stick on something and make it work (Even though, uh, as we shall see, there are. Lol), but it's kind of weird to expect that expense from someone else when OP seems to be completely aware of how much goes into that in the first place.
> Given that few Linux developers are willing to provide old versions of their distributions on line any more
From my memory some distributions that aren't really a Thing anymore but were used for old computers were Knoppix and Puppy.
A quick check and... Puppy is still around and going strong?! Also, it seems like Puppy versions from years ago are still around too (this was 1 click to grab the current iso and a short edit of the URL to go back up in the directory tree LOL) - https://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/
seems to have a metric (expletive)-tonne of distributions going back to uhh, looking at the i486 Zenwalk directory... 2006? is 20 years not good enough??
> Now that many of my old PC's are aging out of Linux
[CITATION NEEDED]
> probably because it uses light-weight desktop environments like IceWm that are rather old and were never standardized to the extent of the more modern environments
Just use Slackware or Puppy and install LXDE...? What exactly is the problem here :/
> Some developers said I should just create my own Linux distribution. I would love to. Unfortunately, that is out of the question for a couple of reasons. First, I just don't have the time. I am too busy...
There's a certain lack of self-awareness in this article.
Maybe don't be critical of open-source developers for not supporting your ancient hardware, when you lack the capability to do so yourself?