This article strikes me largely as, someone else should be doing this for me so I can benefit from their hard work. It's as if they miss the point of Linux, free software, etc...

This problem exists because people, like this author, who are in to vintage systems aren't taking up the mantle to maintain a distribution to support their old systems. It's like they want the benefit with zero effort. Become a leader, start the work and organize a community to take your favorite distribution and make it work on your legacy system.

> But, given that Linux is a community-supported operating system that does not need to make a profit,

Linux doesn't need money to make a living, software maintainers do.

> I see no valid reason for it not supporting every computer that can still be useful.

I assume the author is willing to pay all the people who are going to maintain all of those "computers that can still be useful" instead of demanding that they conjure spare time for that out of nowhere.

As much as I share the sentiment of keeping old hardware alive and useful, reality requires a question of "who's going to work on that".

>But, given that Linux is a community-supported operating system that does not need to make a profit, I see no valid reason for it not supporting every computer that can still be useful.

In other words, because it is a community project made by volunteers that earn nothing, there is no valid reason not to demand more unpaid work.

>In a more enlightened society, all products would be supported for as long as they remain useful. The time has come to stop building obsolescence into our computers and make the small effort required to provide user-friendly distributions of Linux that support near-vintage computers.

The only reason this person believes it is a "small effort" is because she has never ever remotely helped doing the effort herself.

I have made such effort myself. I have been part of Linux user groups and helped lots of people. I have experienced myself what is helping enormously someone for only this person demanding more free work and time just because I have already given her free work and time.

We have given talks in the University: If you want to install Linux do research when you buy a computer so it has compatible components because life is much easier and then the same people attending buying incompatible hardware and demanding us to fix it for them, so she could do the classes ' assignments, because that's what we "enjoyed doing".

Linux has done no such thing. The author is complaining about specifically Linux distributions with graphical user interfaces.

"Linux developers are suffering from the Microsoft disease. Namely, they seem to be too busy chasing the latest fads"

This is also a ridiculous statement. It has traditionally always been Microsoft that wasn't chasing the latest fads. Microsoft has always been late to any new developments and technologies. Apple and Linux have always been the first in class there.

If you want a well supported operating system on your old computer, install Windows on it. Don't rely on the work of enthousiasts that are just trying to build the best next thing.

> The time has come to stop building obsolescence into our computers and make the small effort required to provide user-friendly distributions of Linux that support near-vintage computers.

I look forward to seeing the author’s low-resource Linux distribution; since they’ve identified that as a small-effort task, I expect it won’t take them long to ship it.

I'm as opposed to throwing away machines as the author is, but I also recognise that anything with less than 1 GB of RAM is unusable in this day and age. Modern websites are simply too large to handle on such equipment, and most people do their work online.

There is a perfectly modern Debian distribution available as 32bit. I put this on a 12 years old computer. Yes, that's not 20 years old, but the architecture is largely the same.

GNU userspace as well as the Linux kernels have not abandoned 32bit x86.

Finding a version of Linux that works isn't an issue. Finding a web browser that's usable on an old version of Linux, with today's web might be an issue. But that's not unique to Linux.

I am finding NetBSD works better on old computers than Linux. The differences are not too great. They are basically all based on the same POSIX standards.

I've recently tried to give new life to and old Pentium 166MMX with 80MB of RAM.

It has Windows 2000 installed and I tried many small Linux distributions. DSL runs fine.

You have to lower your expectations, but you can have a nice little system to play around with. You also won't have a modern browser, but, even if you did, you wouldn't have enough RAM or CPU to use most sites.

My conclusion is that if you want to keep such a machine working, you would have to find some specific job for it to do, such as monitoring, honeypot, playing a specific game, text editing, etc.

My Toshiba Libretto 30 still runs Linux fine .. with the version of Slackware I installed on it 20 years ago. Retro OS for retro computing.

Connecting it to the internet would be another matter.

So the author complains that there are linuxes that run on vintage hardware, but they're not usable by novice linux users. The problem, I guess, is that linux on vintage hardware is too inaccessible to people coming from windows, but all the accessible distros are bloated from too much "Microsoft disease?"

Perhaps the features you want are a byproduct of this "disease" then? If you don't want bloated software you may need to get off the bloated software express train and learn how to use something a little more esoteric.

I'm running Sparkylinux on literally that exact model and vintage of Dell laptop and it works fine. It came with an installer and booted fine off of USB, I'm not sure what the problem is. How many vintage hardware aficionados are there who are also unwilling to learn anything new about computers?

Use older Debian releases and you'll benefit from Long Term Support and even Extended LTS.

Don't pick the trendy new distribution of the year if you want something usable on old hardware.

I have old computers, Raspberry Pi's, and virtual machine cloud instances with just 128MB to 512MB RAM and they work perfectly fine for the tasks I use them for. None of those tasks involve anything graphical.

If you want a modern web browser then you need a computer made in the last 10 years or so. The statement that "It's just a browser!" is not a good argument. The modern web is very resource intensive so you need a decent computer.

Slackware or NetBSD would run perfectly.

For Slackware, enable ZRAM:

     wget -O /etc/rc.d/rc.zram https://raw.githubusercontent.com/otzy007/enable-zRam-in-Slackware/master/etc/rc.d/rc.zram

     sed -i 's,1024,512,g' /etc/rc.d/rc.zram

     chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.zram

     echo '/etc/rc.d/rc.zram start' >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local

You won't need Plasma or XFCE. For sure. Deselect them, as lightweight apps are more than enough. Setup Slackbuild thru sbotools. Then, sboinstall icewm and configure it:

- IceWM. Edit the preferences so the fonts match the GTK3 theme. "fc-list | grep fontname" will help you on that.

- Some matching IceWM and GTK3/2 theme. Metal2 from IceWM matches perfectly the Solaris 8 theme from B00merang, Google/DDG it.

- XFE as the file manager, the colour scheme can be changed with ease so it matches the GTK3 colours.

- "udiskie &" in ~/.icewm/startup.

- "nm-applet &" appended to the same file.

- Seamonkey as the web browser, with UBo Legacy.

- AlienBOB has a Chromium build, and I have a huge envvar for Chromium in order to be run fast on machines with at least 1GB of RAM. It's too large in order to be posted here, but I can post it under a separate self-answer to this post.

- Audacious as the audio player, SMplayer for videos.

- For gaming, Slackware has several Slackbuilds with light games. And Wine with multilib.

- Ted/Gnumeric make an amazing and lightweight alternative to LibreOffice.

Most modern distros are 'kitchen sink' distros in that they cater for the majority of cases. And in doing that, they work very well.

However, they don't cater for every situation, every computer that exists. So somebody will be needed to cater for those few cases that aren't covered by mainstream distros.

Now, that somebody has to have good knowledge of Linux and be able to recompile/rewrite whatever is needed for that idiosyncratic distro that works for that particular edge case.

If a few people insist on using an uncommon computer, they have to take on the responsibility of keeping mainstream Gnu Linux working on those particular computers. Or else be satisfied with the older versions of Gnu Linux that were working previously on those computers.

ASIDE: I like making emulators of old 8-bit computers. But I don't try to make those old computers use modern software, they use the CP/M software that was extant at the time those 8-bit computers were made.

I could probably make a Linux desktop distribution run smoothly on pretty much all the legacy hardware I haven't thrown away in fifteen years. That does not make said hardware useful, because every time I had to upgrade was due to web browsing getting slower and slower.

Edit: Quite a few other folks in this comment section seem to have pointed out basically the same thing.

One and only problem with old Laptops is that you cannot just replace the CDROM-drive with Raspberry Pi and call it a day. Because VNC is too slow. There must be some handy way to connect the display. I know you can order HDMI-to-display boards from Alibaba, but this requires dismantling the laptop. Not handy enuff I say.

Edit: I know exactly what would be the optimal solution and it is two-port SATA drive. Rasberry and the old Laptop would share the same drive. Even I could write necessary routines starting from "scrot". And other I/O like keyboard and touchpad would be equally easy. But no two-port drives in Ebay.

The most important problem with keeping old computers running is their carbon footprint. Modern machines are much cheaper to run for the same performance, and even considering the construction of new devices an always on devices needs to be modern and lower power. I've replaced an old Asus nettop PC with a Raspberry Pi 4, and electricity usage has dropped from 30W to single digit power consumption.

Old devices need retiring, like old cars.

I still run debian 32-bit on a P3 1GHz machine reasonably often - it's a legacy PC for gaming. Has 3DFX cards and everything!

Old windows of that vintage can no longer talk modern SMB but Debian i386 can just fine, so I boot debian on it to transfer data from the internet or other modern machines. LXDE is perfectly usable, although I admit I haven't tried a web browser in some time.

Entitled.

They want somebody to write, test and maintain a distribution that works without bugs and easy enough for newbies, on an almost bottomless pit of historical hardware.

You can have this. It's easy. Just hire a developer or two. Oh, you want it for free too?!

You don't have to argue with the many technical issues in the post, the author doesn't deserve the oxygen.

Fund and have a legacy devices and architecture team that takes over support when things become too rare or obsolete. Legacy that can build on or with stable or mainline without impacting current development. Vintage computing or even moderately-recent computing shouldn't be thrown under the bus to chase consumerism only.

I really don't understand the point the author is trying to make. If you have old hardware just use a lightweight distro, or an older version of one of the more popular ones.

If running new software is so important just buy a new computer!?

In an era where a vintage computer is the equivalent of a $35 Raspberry Pi in terms of compute and memory, the rationale to support the former, from an OS perspective, seems incredibly weak.

I'm blown away by this: https://www.kolibrios.org/en/

Dahlia OS https://dahliaos.io/ uses 256MB RAM

Keeping support for near 20 year old consumer grade machines in the kernel seems ridiculous to me. Doing so would bloat the size of the kernel even more than it already is. The more code you have the easier it is for bugs and vulnerabilities to creep in. When people write articles about moving old computers to windows to Linux they generally don't mean 20 year machines. You wouldn't even be able to run a modern browser with 256 mb of ram

I noticed this trend when Debian dropped 386 support in the i386 architecture... Thats already more then 5 years ago.

I have good news: linux is open source, so the author can fix any issues and get it running on their hardware.

> Linux is not a profit-driven operating system for which those arguments are valid.

Here's the main problem with the article.

Nowadays, Linux is a profit-driven operating system. Probably not in the direct sense, yet it is.

You want people implementing hardware support? You need developers, and pay them.

You need integration between the various system components? Same.

And so on...

How about FUZIX? It might be a better fit for vintage computers?

https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX

can someone explain the use of the word vintage? is like something that apparently looks old? something that is actually old?

OP is ready for Buildroot

what's the carbon footprint of running older hardware vs. the carbon footprint of building new hardware + running it?

What’s wrong with installing WinXP+office and calling it a day? Even if someone fulfilled your request and got an up-to-date browser etc working on your 256MB laptop Would YouTube even work?