3 ms·

> Maybe don't be critical of open-source developers for not supporting your ancient hardware You must be like 20. I assure you when you reach 40, a 15 year old

by donatj 3y ago

> Maybe don't be critical of open-source developers for not supporting your ancient hardware You must be like 20. I assure you when you reach 40, a 15 year old device doesn't seem ancient. It's something you bought a couple years ago.

microtonal 3y ago
2009 was the year I bought my first iPhone and sported a white MacBook. Sure seems like aeons ago.
Chris2048 3y ago
I'm nearly 40. For technology, 15 years is a long time.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
CalRobert 3y ago
I've reached forty and recognize that if I won't put my own time or money in to something I shouldn't ask someone else to do it for me.
shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
Respecting other's time and not expecting them to work for you would be a insight that come with age/experience, not from youth. Maybe you are proving me wrong here, both old and expecting people to work for you for free?
- donatj 3y ago
  I think if anything the author is asking for the opposite. Stop actively breaking things that already work. Inaction
  - unmole 3y ago
    > Stop actively breaking things that already work. The old versions will continue to work.
    - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
      No, they won't, for the reasons mentioned in the article.
      - shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
        The article is so riddled with incorrect statements and conclusions, I'm too bored to even summarize them for you. Just read the rest of the comments here if you did not notice anything wrong with the article.
      - anthk 3y ago
        You can't be any more wrong. Debian has full CD/DVD/BluRay sets backed up since v3.0. Slackware had both CD ISOs and repos saved at lots of mirrors.
  - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
    This is the point. This constant barrage of questionable breaking changes cause _everyone_ to need to increase the time they spend on useless maintenance. As a consequence, people decide not do it, and stop supporting applications on the Linux desktop. We are literally asking that you stop doing these changes. It's unfair to ask of developers that since you are spending time breaking their applications, developers should spend time following your breaking changes. Please stop breaking our applications.
nonameiguess 3y ago
Interesting perspective. I'm 43. 15 years ago, Obama was a week away from being inaugurated. I was still in the Army. I hadn't met my wife yet. I can't think of a single thing I own today that I owned then. Forget computing devices. Not even the same house or same car or any clothes. My oldest cat is close. I got her Christmas 2009. Feels like an entirely differently lifetime. Hell, the first mobile phone I ever owned at all was 2007. The first laptop I ever owned was 2003. Nothing about that decade feels like "a couple years ago" other than pop culture. Apparently Taylor Swift had the top selling album of 2009. I'm pretty sure she's still popular. I guess it's an interesting cutoff. I bought my first house in 2010, so a lot of household things from then are things I still own. Shovels and ladders and what not. Certainly not telecommunications and computing devices, though. There has been way too much upheaval and change in protocols and hardware capabilities since then. Possibly no electronics at all? I think all the circuit breakers and outlets in my house are different than then. I suppose flashlights work basically the same.
- adastra22 3y ago
  She just won TIME person of the year for the 2nd time. Still popular indeed!
adastra22 3y ago
I'm 39. I guess that extra year makes a difference? 15 years ago is 2009. CNET's recommended laptop of that year runs at less than 1/10th the performance of current MacBook Air, with an integrated GPU that is 1/100th the speed of a current generation discrete laptop GPU. Oh, and it has almost double the wattage, and probably atrocious battery life by now. A raspberry pi is twice as fast, at a fraction of the energy usage. The cheapest, throwaway windows netbook you can buy today would give you better performance and better energy usage, not to mention increased RAM and storage, and the energy savings would pay for the device in less than a year. So no, I really don't see why we need continued software support for 15-year old hardware.
- anthk 3y ago
  Because the cost of building a new device uses far more resources than just keeping an old laptop alive with a lightweight distro. My GF's ~14yo laptop (Celeron, 2GB, GL 2.1 Intel iGPU) with an SSD still works really fast with Ungoogled Chromium, a deblobbed Slackware and XFCE, even faster than her friends Windows 11 modern laptop with a much better processor and RAM.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    "Resources" is quite broad. Objectively the cost of consumed resources is baked into the price, which as I've mentioned is paid back over a few years in energy savings, without even considering offsets due to recycling the old device. But I assume you mean externalities, which are harder to quantify. I'll use CO2 as a stand-in. Your average laptop generates ~300 kg of CO2 during its full-lifecycle production. That includes refining of materials, electricity used in manufacturing, etc. As mentioned, in 15 years laptop energy usage has gone down about 1/2 to 1/3 of its prior levels, due to a lower baseline power usage and better standby modes. Assuming 8 hours of use per day of a 100W laptop (for round numbers), that ends up being about 300 kWh per year. Which in the USA on average ends up being about 300 lbs of CO2. So in 4 years its lower energy usage has saved more CO2 than was emitted in the manufacture of the new laptop. Replacing old hardware is good for the environment.
    - 3y ago
seba_dos1 3y ago
This is true, but at the same time, completely irrelevant to the valid point GP was making.
red-iron-pine 3y ago
last job had server 2003 and HP-UX all over the place. admittedly in an air-gapped / local-to-the-facility SCADA sense, but we were supporting server 2003 in 2021. were able to get rid of several of them during COVID, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is still one or two orphan 2003 boxes around...

by donatj 3y ago

microtonal 3y ago

2009 was the year I bought my first iPhone and sported a white MacBook. Sure seems like aeons ago.

Chris2048 3y ago

I'm nearly 40. For technology, 15 years is a long time.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

CalRobert 3y ago

I've reached forty and recognize that if I won't put my own time or money in to something I shouldn't ask someone else to do it for me.

shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago

Respecting other's time and not expecting them to work for you would be a insight that come with age/experience, not from youth. Maybe you are proving me wrong here, both old and expecting people to work for you for free?

donatj 3y ago
I think if anything the author is asking for the opposite. Stop actively breaking things that already work. Inaction
- unmole 3y ago
  > Stop actively breaking things that already work. The old versions will continue to work.
  - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
    No, they won't, for the reasons mentioned in the article.
    - shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
      The article is so riddled with incorrect statements and conclusions, I'm too bored to even summarize them for you. Just read the rest of the comments here if you did not notice anything wrong with the article.
    - anthk 3y ago
      You can't be any more wrong. Debian has full CD/DVD/BluRay sets backed up since v3.0. Slackware had both CD ISOs and repos saved at lots of mirrors.
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  This is the point. This constant barrage of questionable breaking changes cause _everyone_ to need to increase the time they spend on useless maintenance. As a consequence, people decide not do it, and stop supporting applications on the Linux desktop. We are literally asking that you stop doing these changes. It's unfair to ask of developers that since you are spending time breaking their applications, developers should spend time following your breaking changes. Please stop breaking our applications.

nonameiguess 3y ago

Interesting perspective. I'm 43. 15 years ago, Obama was a week away from being inaugurated. I was still in the Army. I hadn't met my wife yet. I can't think of a single thing I own today that I owned then. Forget computing devices. Not even the same house or same car or any clothes. My oldest cat is close. I got her Christmas 2009. Feels like an entirely differently lifetime. Hell, the first mobile phone I ever owned at all was 2007. The first laptop I ever owned was 2003. Nothing about that decade feels like "a couple years ago" other than pop culture. Apparently Taylor Swift had the top selling album of 2009. I'm pretty sure she's still popular. I guess it's an interesting cutoff. I bought my first house in 2010, so a lot of household things from then are things I still own. Shovels and ladders and what not. Certainly not telecommunications and computing devices, though. There has been way too much upheaval and change in protocols and hardware capabilities since then. Possibly no electronics at all? I think all the circuit breakers and outlets in my house are different than then. I suppose flashlights work basically the same.

adastra22 3y ago
She just won TIME person of the year for the 2nd time. Still popular indeed!

adastra22 3y ago

I'm 39. I guess that extra year makes a difference? 15 years ago is 2009. CNET's recommended laptop of that year runs at less than 1/10th the performance of current MacBook Air, with an integrated GPU that is 1/100th the speed of a current generation discrete laptop GPU. Oh, and it has almost double the wattage, and probably atrocious battery life by now. A raspberry pi is twice as fast, at a fraction of the energy usage. The cheapest, throwaway windows netbook you can buy today would give you better performance and better energy usage, not to mention increased RAM and storage, and the energy savings would pay for the device in less than a year. So no, I really don't see why we need continued software support for 15-year old hardware.

anthk 3y ago
Because the cost of building a new device uses far more resources than just keeping an old laptop alive with a lightweight distro. My GF's ~14yo laptop (Celeron, 2GB, GL 2.1 Intel iGPU) with an SSD still works really fast with Ungoogled Chromium, a deblobbed Slackware and XFCE, even faster than her friends Windows 11 modern laptop with a much better processor and RAM.
- adastra22 3y ago
  "Resources" is quite broad. Objectively the cost of consumed resources is baked into the price, which as I've mentioned is paid back over a few years in energy savings, without even considering offsets due to recycling the old device. But I assume you mean externalities, which are harder to quantify. I'll use CO2 as a stand-in. Your average laptop generates ~300 kg of CO2 during its full-lifecycle production. That includes refining of materials, electricity used in manufacturing, etc. As mentioned, in 15 years laptop energy usage has gone down about 1/2 to 1/3 of its prior levels, due to a lower baseline power usage and better standby modes. Assuming 8 hours of use per day of a 100W laptop (for round numbers), that ends up being about 300 kWh per year. Which in the USA on average ends up being about 300 lbs of CO2. So in 4 years its lower energy usage has saved more CO2 than was emitted in the manufacture of the new laptop. Replacing old hardware is good for the environment.
  - 3y ago

seba_dos1 3y ago

This is true, but at the same time, completely irrelevant to the valid point GP was making.

red-iron-pine 3y ago

last job had server 2003 and HP-UX all over the place. admittedly in an air-gapped / local-to-the-facility SCADA sense, but we were supporting server 2003 in 2021. were able to get rid of several of them during COVID, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is still one or two orphan 2003 boxes around...