Re: Old Hardware

Physfitfreak <physfitfreak@gmail.com> wrote at 21:52 this Thursday (GMT):

On 12/19/24 3:35 PM, Farley Flud wrote:

I hear a lot of ignoramus assholes talk about how GNU/Linux is
the savior of old, and obsolescent, hardware.
 
That certainly is true, but not how these assholes believe.
 
GNU/Linux can indeed accommodate any old hardware configuration,
but don't expect the average distro to do it.
 
Example:
 
Let's say that you want floppy disk access.  Floppy disks have
been obsolete for many, many years, but GNU/Linux can easily
provide access.
 
But not through the average fucking distro!
 
To get floppy access, one has to go to kernel.org, which contains
ALL the kernels since the very beginning, and find the last
kernel version that has floppy drivers.  Then, the kernel has
to compiled and installed.
 
Also, the repositories of GLIBC would have to be searched for an
appropriate, if necessary, version to support floppy access.
 
Again, any software that may be relevant to floppy access would
have to be acquired from the archives of said software.
 
In this way, a complete system that supports floppy disk access
could be built.
 
GNU/Linux can support ALL hardware back to 1991 but the user has
to be prepared to build the system.  No distro can do it.
 
What about Microslop Winblows?
 
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!  That proprietary piece of junk can't
support anything beyond yesterday.  (One of my client's scanners
suddenly failed with one of their stupid updates.)
 
Microslop has no archives.  Such is never the way of commercial
garbage.
 
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
 
 

>
>
>
But what you say can be done with Linux can be done with Winblows
machines too. Just install an earlier version of Winblows and do not
update.
>
Which is simpler?

[snip]


The thing is that it's pretty hard to avoid updates on Win10/11, and
most software isn't supported on anything older. It's not being actively
developed at all.
--
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom