On Sun, 9 Oct 2022 08:32:04 +0200 Neal Gompa wrote:
If we're going to bring up the environment, the computers made more than ten years ago are vastly more energy inefficient and pull more energy than most computers you can buy in the last five years. Recycling those computers and harvesting their base materials to produce better computers would be good for the environment because it reduces the carbon footprint of that person using a computer. Maybe the systems which are obsoleted do not run 24/7 but only a few hours a week. Then the energy saved by a new system will never compensate the energy consumed for manufacturing the new system.
Raising the baseline to x86_64-v2 also has the effect of raising the generational baseline to something that is generally useful for contemporary Linux system software.
Actually it means obsoleting systems for the sake of ... obsoleting systems (because some day in the future they could be insufficient to run a then current Linux). In german c't magazine 2011 issue 12 there was a suggestion for a high performance PC with a Phenom II X6. Probably this system still outperforms everything built ever since with something called Celeron inside. And it will be obsoleted by requiring x86_64-v2. According to the data there is almost no performance gain by using x86_64-v2. I can not think of a good analogy, but it is similar to saying: we only support USB 3 superspeed keyboards from now on. Nobody will have any benefit because nobody can type so fast. But it sounds cool. Kind regards, Dieter