Am 18.02.2025 um 20:28 schrieb Lubos Kocman via openSUSE Factory <factory@lists.opensuse.org>:
Leap removing legacy BIOS seems to be also an open question. As it seems now SUSE will likely support legacy bios on certain scenarios (VM images etc), so the boot stack itself will likely be supported.
wow, what a long discussion! ... considering the whole topic is just about getting the system up. :-) I mean, since throwing out windows and the nvidia graphic card back in the late 1990ies, I have never much thought about booting anymore. It's basically the hardware starting some code on a certain place on disk, that ... over some hops like a bootloader and an initrd loading and handing over to the kernel, and that finally handing over to an init process/system, nowadays mostly systemd. So if maintaining some code there is so much effort, then it seems that there must have been grown a lot of inter-stage, complex code in that area over the years. Well. What I didn't get so far, or I must have missed that: if the suggestion is to remove the support from SLES16/Leap16 to save much effort, then I'm wondering how that effort is saved exactly ... considering that the same support shall be kept in Tumbleweed? And further: what packages are we talking about exactly? ... because some packages like some from Base:System are also sync'ed with SLE from time to time? My personal usage: I have no idea whether my Dell PC from 2013 supports it - I never had to think about it. Then there's also quite some VMs (both openSUSE and SLES). How about other virtualization than the already mentioned qemu like Virtualbox, or some VMware ESX versions? Finally: the whole world was shocked that Win11 partially doesn't support like 4-5 year old HW, and there have been articles in several magazines to migrate them to Linux. Nice! Now it would be a very unlucky timing if SUSE/openSUSE would get into the same boat with a similar move; the Windows fan clubs would ROFL about Linux. Should be avoided, especially if it would be singling out our beloved distribution only. Have a nice day, Berny