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This sounds like it's fun. However, I have to ask, why should the linux world cater to supporting 30 year old systems? Just because it scratches an itch? You

• tyfon 1y ago
  The system is actually running fine standalone since I have been able to avoid rust software. As to why it should cater to it, it's more that there is no need to remove something that already works just to remove it. It is possible to compile rustc on another system so it supports i586 and below. Just a small change in the command line options. And it doesn't degrade the newer systems. I have plenty of faster machines, I just enjoy not throwing things away or making odd systems work. It's called having fun :)
  • cogman10 1y ago
    > it's more that there is no need to remove something that already works just to remove it. There actually is. Support for old systems isn't free. Mistakes in the past are hard to fix and verify on these old systems. Particularly, the fact that there's not a whole lot of devs with access to dual pentium pro systems to verify changes which would affect such systems. That means that if there's a break in the kernel or elsewhere that ultimately impacts such system they'll hear from a random retro computing enthusiast which takes time from everyone to resolve and review patches to fix the retro computer. Time is precious for open source software. It's in limited supply. I get doing this for fun or the hell of it. But you do need to understand there are costs involved.
• grayhatter 1y ago
  > You can grab a $150 NUC I grew up without money, it makes me laugh when I read comments like this. You can just, yeah when you're fortunate enough to have a strong support system; you can. My understanding is that the systems are not meaningfully common, and are hobbyist archs. But the idea that dropping support is fine because you can just throw money at it is so incredibly divorced from reality that I actually feel bad for anyone that believes this. I deeply believe that if you don't like what a maintainer of FOSS code has done, you should fork the project. Admittedly that's a very onerous suggestion. But more important than that, you should help people when you can. If you're deciding to drop support for a bunch of people because it makes your job easier or simpler, when you don't need to. You're the bad guy in the story. That's the way this announcement has been written, and most reasonable people object to that kind of behavior. Selfishness should feel a bit offensive to everyone.
  • cogman10 1y ago
    Your post is offensive to me. I have plenty of relatives without money or resources and $150 is something they can all afford. It's not even the floor of the amount of money needed (Here's a used NUC for $30 [1]), but rather just showing that a new system can be had for a lot less than many people expect. You are the one divorced from reality if you think there's an army of poor orphans running modern linux on pentium pros. Affording rent and health insurance is a FAR bigger issue than being able to throw a little money towards a new computer once every 10 years. [1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/366000004972?_skw=NUC&itmmeta=01KAY1RQAD4BHY4QJZTE9T8DBM&hash=item55374cdf6c:g:~EYAAeSwemNpHQz2&itmprp=enc%3AAQAKAAAA4FkggFvd1GGDu0w3yXCmi1f%2F63LVxE55uSXViK9RwdlLQYDxw%2FNeuEVgSqGKnsLXAgAopabkevOzDqLGxSg%2FwdM7om%2BbgZEizaa%2Fhxa8X%2FIZrm4tYPXTlzji7KFdWnoo%2B7OwhndFjblxzcHOUjsR7CWcfAbgTCtDaN6sDpSCDGf12pxQnOG%2B%2BvNZQMIIZjNq7eAk83NuxuDUEU9rgbu9EAKd7xACqVYEYauWM8QTXnzfRxrW7ux5MXxY9kIG8oVhP5tl6%2FxPzKa5DMD%2FXMK5xK2%2FONkyTgoKASuCh%2Blb4Ghy%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR7j14sHXZg https://www.ebay.com/itm/366000004972?_skw=NUC&itmmeta=01KAY...
  • pornel 1y ago
    The situation today is very different than what it used to be when people actually used 386 or Amigas because they had no other options (BTW, Rust supports m68k, just not AmigaOS specifically). Today even crappiest old PCs that you can fish out of a dumpster are already new enough to have Rust/LLVM support. We have mountains of Rust-compatible e-waste that you can save from landfill. Take whatever is cheapest on eBay, or given away on your local FB marketplace, and it will run Rust, and almost certainly be orders of magnitude faster and more practical than the unsupported retro hardware. Using actual too-niche-for-Rust hardware today is more expensive. Such machines are often collectors' items, and need components and accessories that are hard to obtain, or need replacements/adapters that can be custom low-volume products. Even if you can put together something from old-but-not-museum-yet parts, it's not going to make more sense economically than getting an older-gen Raspberry PI kit or its Ali Express knock-offs (there are VGA dongles more expensive than some of these boards). It's fine to appreciate SGI and DEC Alpha, have fun using BE OS, or prove that AmigaOS is still a perfectly fine daily driver, but let's not pretend it's a situation that people are in due to economic hardship.