I've been having a hard time getting Linux to work on older hardware ever since the majority of distros dropped 32-bit builds.
Then again, "older" for me means stuff from the Pentium through the Pentium 4 era. Seeing as "older" today means Sandy Bridge and the like, the moral of this little tale is I am a fucking old man angry at the kids on my lawn.
The x86-64 architecture was introduced in 1999, with the first processor introduced in 2003. Comparatively, the 8088, introduced in 1979, was barely older at the time than the 64-bit Opteron is now.
Not as long as i386 devices still exist that are superior in at least one way to any amd64 or arm alternative. And what "superior" means depends on the use case. Some Mega Ryzen Uber Speed CPU with a Googol FLOPS that can't connect to anything is worthless to me.
I won't take any distro seriously that doesn't support at least i686, amd64, arm and arm64.
Compiling for four architectures can't be too much to ask. Shit software that can't be written portably enough to run on more than amd64 must be kicked off the repo. We need this pressure on developers if we're to maintain a modicum of code quality.
> Shit software that can't be written portably enough to run on more than amd64 must be kicked off the repo.
Convince me, why should I spend my time supporting i686? Just to accommodate a handful of people still running 32bit hardware?
Calling other people's work "shit" just because they don't spend their free time supporting the wishes (not needs!) of 0.1% of their users is rude and extremely entitled.
FWIW, I agree with you. But I think there is an argument to be made: the OpenBSD team has indicated that cross-architecture ports help them find bugs that otherwise might not be noticed if they were just targeting the usual suspects.
I've been having a hard time getting Linux to work on older hardware ever since the majority of distros dropped 32-bit builds.
Then again, "older" for me means stuff from the Pentium through the Pentium 4 era. Seeing as "older" today means Sandy Bridge and the like, the moral of this little tale is I am a fucking old man angry at the kids on my lawn.