3 ms·
Few notes: - supporting old hw with modern software tend to be pointless, let's say you can found anything compiled for the relevant arch, you got a WM and a s
by kkfx 3y ago
Few notes:
- supporting old hw with modern software tend to be pointless, let's say you can found anything compiled for the relevant arch, you got a WM and a set of app deployed flawlessly, then? A modern web-app + a modern WebVM improperly named browser for legacy reasons it's simply way too heavy for the iron. Specially for the graphic part, and most of today's activities happen on web-apps demanding modern WebVM. Oh, of course you can write your thesis in LaTeX, but not with Zotero, you can run Emacs, but it will be painfully slow and so on. You can use the machine as a homeserver for stuff who do not demand much BUT that's means consuming much more energy than a modern raspi for similar performances... In the end it's just about showing old hw and something running on it;
- in the aforementioned terms all you need is just an old ISO image packaged with as much as software of that time you can, it's relatively doable, but it waste resources just to show an old system, without practical usage, it's normal most distros do not support such scenarios, it's more about some heritage foundations...
Now the part I agree:
- most modern OSes, not just GNU/Linux are designed for another era, not a modern one, but a very ancient one, I mean in 2024 decades after the first release of NixOS or Guix system having classical installers who take care of partitioning than spreading some archives on a fs tree it's absurd. A archaic design from the '80s;
- most modern package managers are born after the '80s, but they lag behind '80s tech. They are just archives of files to be spread in a tree. Having something that better map source and binaries crafting a system in code it's very needed and missed on most current OSes;
- most file systems are archaic, we need to go past beyond files and directories and even if in the past some have done so, like to a certain extent BeOS, we still have even users who manage their information in files & folders.
The above aspects are not much interested for keep up old iron but to evolve in modern time, actual state of tech is TERRIBLE for the actual state of possible tech we have.
- anthk 3y agoWho cares if they are ancient; they work with ease and they are easy to set up and backup, something the gen-z misses terribily and fails to understand over and over reinventing the wheel.
- kkfx 3y agoThey are definitively NOT easy to manage: - you can't know their current state, since anything is deployed one command at a time, and then other commands to upgrade and so on, while OSes like NixOS/Guix Systems are just a network of symlinks rebuilt from a config upon any change; - you can't replicate them from scratch, even if you automate, no matter if Ansible/Salt, homegrown scripts, fog or something else, a proper replication demand a gazzilion of things to be manually prepared from a custom ISO or the current official ISO + all you change and you need to keep anything up, again NixOS/Guix System replicate from the config and making a custom ISO as a helper is just few lines of the very same language config; - classic package manager badly accept user modifications, something have done for sources (FreeBSD ports, Gentoo/make.conf and so on) but essentially nothing for binaries, just some rigid and limited automation by Debian with "alternatives" and "configure", again a nightmare to get something custom; - backups? There is NO DAMN REASON to backup an OS, data of course, no matter if homes or /var stuff BUT definitively not an OS, it must be reconstruct and frequently since anything derive more or less quickly and to be reliable you need to been able to replicate with the minimum effort. Just try to compare a NixOS/NixOps managed infra vs a RH/kickstarted or Debian/Preseeded one). Gen-Z probably do not even know what's a file https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc... but that's a totally different matter, classic systems including current commercial big ones are archaic crap.