0x0 comments on 28 years after the final Intel 486 desktop CPUs rolled off assembly lines, Linux is finally dropping support for it

[–] 0x0@lemmy.zip 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I'm not so sure Microslop dropped 486 support.
Like someone else said, there's a lot of industrial hardware still running these.
Just because it doesn't make sense for your bubble doesn't mean it's the right approach. Luckily, quite a few distros still support 32 bit. Less ewaste.

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[–] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 7 points 7 months ago

A lot of industrial and commercial hardware using Windows was abandoned by the manufacturer decades ago. There is a lot of hardware that still needs Windows XP to control, some even stuck on Windows 98. As aging hardware breaks it is becoming harder to find replacements. For a lot of this, the software to run it is so focused that emulation layers cause issues.

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[–] Feyter@programming.dev 5 points 7 months ago

I'm pretty sure those machines still run WinXP at best ;)

And yes that's exactly what I said. You still can run Linux on a 486 for this special edge cases, it's just that the Linux Kernel team will no longer provide the service for maintaining it. If it is such an important thing for crucial industry machines, they can definitely pay someone patching it back in.

For the overwhelmingly majority of Linux use cases it's not a concern anymore. So why should they do the extra work, instead of spending the time elsewhere?

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