117
Steam Will End Windows 32-bit OS Support Next Year - Hopefully Linux Follows (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
43 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 2 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Just because they existed during the Linux era doesn’t mean they ran Linux; Torvalds was writing for the 386 from the beginning, and Linux has never been written for anything below 32-bit.

Now, it certainly has RAN on that hardware through emulation, such as on a 4 bit Intel 4004, but only for the heck of it.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 7 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (6 children)

    Linux has never been written for anything below 32-bit.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embeddable_Linux_Kernel_Subset

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (5 children)

    Technically not the Linux kernel.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    How is it not? It is a fork of the linux kernel.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    For one, it explicitly calls itself a “subset”; a subset is not the whole set.

    If we don’t want to go just off the pedantics of language though, then here’s the thing: it was forked a very long time ago, and both have diverged significantly, I think. It’s a bit like saying Blink (the rendering engine of Chromium) is WebKit; sure, Blink is a fork of WebKit, but the two are very different now.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

    I mean... obviously 8086 "x86" is more limited than modern x86. So obviously there will be reduced features and divergence.

    And by your logic, because it diverged 25 years ago... modern linux is...no longer linux.

    If you want a valid argument, its not GNU/linux since it doesnt use GNU tools...

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    To clarify, what I mean is WebKit continued while Blink became its own thing. Factually, Blink is not WebKit anymore.

    Replace “WebKit” with Linux and Blink with ELKS.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    And webkit is a fork of khtml.

    Noone is arguing forks are "their own thing" but we can all agree they are all derived from the same base and have diverged from factors such as solviing different problems or simply different developer methodology.

    They're is no straight line. There are hundreds of linux kernel offshoots. Some are more tightly coupled with the main, some are highly specific to a single cpu architecture.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent