Hello, On Mon, Dec 05, 2022 at 10:47:33AM -0600, Larry Len Rainey wrote:
Ok,
I woke up this morning with this question?
If Tumbleweed is the latest Kernel and Software Versions, why are we worried about hardware that is over 8 years old?
One of the things that Linux has going for it is that it is not particularly picky about hardaware - it can run pretty much on anything, even the newest versions.
If the hardware is old - force them to go to Leap or other Linux flavors
Except it's not clear Leap wiil. It certainly does not do 32bit.
that specialize in i586 and 32 bit stuff.
I know that the Levovo IdeaStick 300 (2017) could not run Tumbleweed or Leap as the BIOS only supported 32 bit UEFI code. That forced me to Sparky Linux on those computers as they had a 32 bit /boot/EFI that worked.
The sales pitch that I used with Walmart to go to Unix (and later to Linux) is if you dislike the vendor - you can switch to another with little application impact (if on the same processor family). Walmart like to play the hardware vendors against each other - they had NCR MPRAS, IBM AIX and HP HPUX machines all running the same apps to force lower pricing. Sometimes, it does not pay to migrate to newer, Walmart has an application they cannot find a "cost acceptable" replacement and it still runs on a 1989 100 mhz 486 running NCR MPRAS 1.0. - they have stockpiles bunches of used old NCR 486 machine and dozens of SCSI I drives that the old Microchannel computers use. That application is so embedded with other applications that it would cost millions to replace it and most of the programs that use it may not have the source code to change.
I have switched from Mandrake to Fedora, to Centos, to openSUSE and every application and script I wrote worked (sometime after recompiling from 32 bit to 64 bit). I use Tumbleweed for osc development on 8th Gen Intel processors - You can find nice 8th gen units on eBay for under $250 with everything including Windows 11. I also have Leap 15.4 as my primary computer OS.
One of the benefits Linux distributions may offer is that they run on all my hardaware. If I have to change the distribution on one machine I am likely to migrate the others as well for consistency. While a program may work on all of the distributions the network settings and other system settings are implemented differently, there are different package managers, etc. I do not want to deal with that stuff when I am actively using under a dozen machines that are not particularly exotic.
Sometimes it is "Time to cut bait" as American say when the fishing is so bad you go home.
Such as go to another distro that does not impose arbitrary restrictions on the hardware that you can use, sure. Most of them actually don't as far as x86-vN goes because there have been no proven technical benefits to doing it that would outweigh the costs of replacing a lot of hardware on the user side as well as the distro infrastructure side. This discussion is, however, about Tumbleweed and how Tumbleweed can balance development and maintenanace effort with utility for the users. My personal view is that the userbase of openSUSE is not so large that we have to actively turn users away. Thanks Michal