When I decided to switch to using Linux as my primary OS I had Artix and Debian dreams (personal and work/enterprise) but the refurb dell 5420 rugged I got had other ideas... Tried many distros and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS was the only one that worked without nomodeset. (Funnily enough that's the version Dell officially supports who would have thought..)

Guess I now have a year to figure out how to get these darn Intel GPU drivers to work on an up to date distro before I stop getting security patches..

(Still gonna run KDE tho)

My business VPSs are running Debian with windows server VMs and this laptop's main purpose is gonna be SSH connections to those anyway but still.

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[–] 2 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Let's say the computer you want to use is only supported in an older kernel -- do some of those get back-ported security patches, or to you need to air gap it from the internet?

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  • [–] 3 points 21 hours ago (1 child)

    Depends on your risk model. To simplify my point of view: risk = severity * likelyhood. If it's unlikely and relatively nonconsequential to overcome, it's still low risk.

    There is a world where running an old kernel and latest firefox gets you hacked, say maybe buggy GPU drivers with a really really bad opengl vulnerability?. I think it's quite unlikely. Like what hacker targets your weird GPU driver several years out of date?

    I think it's much more likely your few-days-outdated LTS version of firefox gets hacked instead, because even if you have an old and fully supported distro, updates are often a bit more delayed (backporting patches takes still some time from maintainers). LTS distro maintainers also do choose what bugs and vulnerability get backported or not, and not everything crosses the line.

    If you do things like accessing your bank with your life savings or your crypto wallet then please do get a more modern distro and live with the hardware incompatibilities. If you use it to browse facebook and the news, read emails and write some random documents, there's not much there to steal for a hacker anyway.

    IMHO just the fact you are not running windows and are on the latest version of the software means you'll be all fine, for many, many years, even with an old, unsupported kernel. Your old pc will probably die before a hacker gets in.

    If you have compliance requirements from your company... get your company to buy you a better, more modern pc please. Like, wtf, that thing has probably hardware and firmware vulnerabilities too!

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 20 hours ago

    That was an interesting writeup thanks!

    In my case I'm kinda setting my own compliance requirements. I'd think that a thin client having enterprise vendor LTS support for core libraries and CVEs will be plenty safe until I have 4 grand to spend on new client hardware. (Independent contractor with data center dedicated servers that actually run up to date distros for the actual work)

    My other option is to use windows 11 since that fully supports the hardware I have but I really don't know if that's truly safer than a stable OS with another 6 years of official support lined up. I just didn't expect compatibility issues with a bog standard 9 year old chipset, nvme ssd and 16gb of ram.

    Hardware incompatibilities are a bit hard to live with when it means burning your retinas and the whole point of this specific hardware being the sunlight readable display and the ability to survive the inevitable contact with water on a boat.

    Considering how many servers still run Ubuntu 18.04 in production I wouldn't dismiss the idea of someone putting effort into finding vulnerabilities but those would be unlikely to target desktops anyway.

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