On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 12:24 PM, Rob OpenSuSE
If I took out a pentium MMX based 8MiB RAM machine, do you think openSUSE 11.2 should just work on it? If not why is your old hardware worthy and mine not?
Of course not. 8MB was a super bare minimum even 10 years ago. However, I Pentium II/II with 512MB RAM should work properly. Even some of those machines can't support 512MB. I have a Thinkpad X21 P3/700 that maxes are 384. I also had a Pentium Pro Server that had 4GB RAM and dual procs years ago. A 200Mhz PPro is still too slow for most things.
The problem is, you cannot stop the external world changing, new things being developed, that require resources. At some point you have to cut the cloth to suit and accept that the power & maintenance consumed by a device make it uneconomic.
Which is why I don't use my Poweredge 6350 with 1GB RAM and Quad 500Mhz Xeons.
You do not need all bugfixes/patches & support to display applications that run on newer hardware via X. Without need to support X and modern desktop, then the hardware requirements for practical use of the distro drop significantly. Imposing that a distro support everything for ever requirement, will make a distribution untestable and it unworkable to move forwards, becoming impossibly impractical over any long timescale. There are conservative distributions, that do aim at longevity of old hardware, and they can take decisions to suit that niche.
Well, there is also the fact that as more resources are available programmers use them even if they don't need to. A lot of projects are more interested in adding questionable features than making the code efficient. Do things like compositing really make people more able to get their work done? That's a very debatable point. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org