I didn’t know whether to mark this NSFW or not but it’s time to buy a new computer if you haven’t upgraded in multiple decades.
That’s a real showcase of how linux actually cares about its users over other companies. It’s great to see that hardware I buy now will be supported on linux for a long long time into the future.
but what abt my 386SX tho
Whew. My 586 is safe.
For now
I remember when Mandrake was a young distro – a redhat derivative – and they (gasp) chose to compile for i586 instead of i386. People were like VROooooOM! And a bunch of other people were like: why would you target CPU instructions that not everyone has?!
I switched to Mandrake for that (back in the day).
Nooooooooo my…wait I’ve never actually owned a 486. Carry On.
I never owned a 486 either. My first upgrade after the 286 was a Pentium.
i like this. hardware should be the least disposable as possible, as long as there is manpower to maintain it. as long as theres people still using it fruitfully, its not trash.
It’s sad, when you think about it, because I was under the impression that Linux was perfect for old/ancient machines, but if support for old hardware gets thrown away…
Latest 486 “distro” released 3 months ago:
https://github.com/marmolak/gray486linux
Same userland as Alpine Linux. Newer version of MUSL than current Void Linux ships with. Up to the minute kernel.
The oldest kernel version still getting updates at kernel.org is from 6 years ago. So, we may still have active 486 support in official kernels for years yet.
Even after that, the kernel will stay available. You can always backport any important security fixes yourself.
And this is just the kernel. A 486 will run current c libraries for decades most likely.
You can still use Linux on 386 and Git commits as recent as a year ago say things like “adding support for new hardware”.
https://github.com/marmolak/gray386linux
Again, even on a 386 you have the same C library and userland as found in current Alpine Linux.
Old kernels still run on it, it just won’t get new versions.
The reason Linux (and BSD) is perfect for old machines is that the source code is available, so anyone can maintain it if they want to. It doesn’t mean the core Linux team has to maintain it for them though.
Its like… Bro… Its a 486 CPU
