On Sun, Oct 9, 2022 at 4:57 AM Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> wrote:
Stefan Brüns composed on 2022-10-09 02:42 (UTC+0200):
Felix Miata wrote:
Stefan Brüns composed on 2022-10-09 00:42 (UTC+0200):
99% of users have bought sufficient hardware during the last 10 years.
Where did that number come from?
From common sense. Actually, during the last 10 years you could not buy anything new which is not x86_64-v2.
Why 10? In Linux user circles recommendations are universally to not buy "new", but to buy something in the at least 6-12 month old range. So really, 10 isn't 10, but less.
10 is arbitrary. Lots of people never buy major expense items new. I've never bought a "new" car, only "pre-owned". I've acquired far more PCs for free than using money, and only a small portion using money were "new" (as in less than a year since availability of their CPUs was introduced). Several have been older than a year when "new". Among my siblings' households, all 4 have at least 2 PCs running Linux, while 3 have almost no PCs less than 12 years old. The newest 7 are Core2Duo Dells, except for one gamer who built a new AMD less than 5 years ago.
x86_64 has been available since late 2003, and x86_64-v2 was introduced early 2011 (Intel Sandybridge)/late 2011 (AMD Bulldozer).
So the first 7 years of x86_64 are baseline, everything after (11 years) is x86_64-v2. So even assuming not a single unit has been decommisioned, and shipments per year are the same (actually, it went up from 180M units in 2004, 310M in 2013 to 345M in 2021) 60% of all x86_64 PCs ever built are v2 or better.
So, 40% are unaccounted for, either recommissioned, cannibalized (partial recommissioning), or landfill or recycler fodder.
Taking growing markets and decommissioning into account, 99% is a quite plausible number.
Reason cannot just ignore those not "buying". Acquisitions also come from those decommissioned by original users, not due to failure, but due to policy, warranty expiration, or less utopian reasons, of otherwise perfectly useful equipment that may have been little more than dust collectors most of their calendar lives, and having much otherwise useful potential.
(BTW: You question my 99%, but leave Larrys 99% claim without questioning it. Go figure ...)
That sentence had the M word in it, so no good reason to eval.
Not all users buy. Many can only acquire whatever is available for no money.
Enterprises buy. Private persons buy. And this hardware ends up with persons who can not afford to buy sooner or later.
Not a reason to arbitrarily increase the pool of the valueless among the indigent and landfills. It's bad for the planet to dig up all that ore and burn fuel to manufacture unneeded replacements that may be in /actual/ use no more than marginally better than working equipment they replace.
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. The reason why x86_64-v3 is unreasonable is that there were Intel CPUs made as recently as 2020 that can't satisfy that spec, nevermind x86_64-v4. 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. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!