[TUHS] Macs and future unix derivatives
Will Senn
will.senn at gmail.com
Tue Feb 9 17:17:21 AEST 2021
On 2/9/21 12:55 AM, 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
>
Sigh... 32bit will be 2nd tier in FreeBSD 13 :)
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