[TUHS] Macs and future unix derivatives

[Michael Huff]

On 2/8/2021 9:55 PM, John Gilmore wrote:
> Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:
>>      	   			    Apple loves to move quickly and abandon
>> compatibility, and in that respect it's an interesting counterpoint to
>> Linux or a *BSD where you can have decades old binaries that still run.
> That was true decades ago, but no longer.  In the intervening time, all
> the major Linux distributions have stopped releasing OS's that support
> 32-bit machines.  Even those that support 32-bit CPUs have often
> desupported the earlier CPUs (like, what was wrong with the 80386?).
> Essentially NO applications require 64-bit address spaces, so arguably
> if they wanted to lessen their workload, they should have desupported
> the 64-bit architectures (or made kernels and OS's that would run on
> both from a single release).  But that wouldn't give them the
> gee-whiz-look-at-all-the-new-features feeling.
>
> I ran 32-bit OS releases on all my 64-bit x86 hardware for years.  They
> ran faster and smaller than the amd64 versions, and also ran old
> binaries for more than a decade.  But their vendors and support teams
> decided that doing the release-engineering to keep them running was more
> work than pulling the plug.
>
> Even Fedora has desupported the One Laptop Per Child hardware now -- no
> new releases for millions of kids!  And desupported all the other cheap
> Intel mobile CPUs, let alone your typical desktop 80386, 80486, or
> Pentium.  Have you tried running Linux on a machine without a GPU
> these days?  It's truly sad that to gain stupid animated window tricks,
> they broke compatability with millions of existing systems.
>
> Here's one overview of the niche distros that still have x86 support:
>
>    https://fossbytes.com/best-lightweight-linux-distros/
>
> Even those are dropping like flies, e.g. Ubuntu MATE now says "For older
> hardware based on i386. Supported until April 2021", i.e. only til next
> month!  The PuppyLinux.com web site is now a 404.  Etc.
>
> (I'm not up on what the BSD releases are doing.)
>
> 	John

i386 has been demoted on FreeBSD: 
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2021-January/002006.html

I don't think there's any change on NetBSD, no idea about OpenBSD but I 
assume they're the same.

In all honest, I don't think that backwards compatibility has ever been 
that great on Linux -at least not for the last twenty or so years, in my 
(limited) experience. It's not like Solaris where you could build on 2.4 
and there's a good chance it will run on 11 or at least 10.