we need laws that require companies to unlock boot loaders when they drop support, or at least provide the means to do so.
Or just always? I buy a device, I want full control over it.
That is not too much to ask.
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Forgot my laptop charger at the office for a week long event this past week and no time to recover it from the office. Had a 13 year old system76 laptop in the closet. Grabbed a spare external SSD (had an internal HDD), put the latest version of Ubuntu on it, and it worked flawlessly for the week without an issue. I maintain a dotfiles repo and keep backups of everything on b2 using rclone that encrypts/decrypts the files. Took less than hour to have my entire workflow ready to go on a new install without relying on proprietary spyware (icloud/one drive).
Unless you used Ubuntu 32 bit, then they’ll just drop you like a sack of potatoes, in that regard Canonical is no better than Google
I replaced ChromeOS with Linux forever ago when they dropped support for my hardware. It would be a brick if not for Linux.
I have a pc so old that updates can’t be done anymore as the CPU is almost 30 now and the architecture isn’t supported anymore…
(its basically my personal Museum)
Damn! What architecture is it?
Its a iAPX 286, 16 Bit Microprocessor from 1982
Wow, that’s an old one. I guess your best bet is FreeDOS, then.
Nah i don’t use it for business, its just a “look i have a super old pc and it still runs Linux, get Linux” kind of thing
Not really true. Plenty of Linux distributions dropped 32bit support years ago and 32bit systems are a lot younger than 20 years (last ones were some Intel Atoms released around 2010).
When talking about Linux desktops it includes distros like Debian, who will support i386 until, at least 2028. Even some fast moving distros like OpenSuse Tumbleweed still support i386.
“32bit systems are a lot younger than 20 years”
I don’t follow. The i386 is almost 40 years old now. Can you elaborate?
it may have began 4 decades ago, but what matters is that only one decade ago new hardware was still being released.
And new processors stopped supporting x86-32 a decade ago?
I have Linux running strongly on two laptops from 2007. If I still had my old Dell from 2003, I’d bet I could get the latest Puppy Linux running on it. Maybe even something like Debian or Arch32, if I maxed out the RAM.
