I don’t have a 486. I don’t know anyone who has a 486. I wouldn’t know what to do with a 486. I know full well that all versions before 7.1 will be fully usable forever and that someone would fork the kernel if they actually needed to run modern Linux on a 486.
And still this makes me a little bit sad and angry.
The only people I see doing anything with a 486 are pointless challenge videos getting something modern to run on old hardware for kicks. Tiny population.
I think the main impact here is that there are plenty of embedded system-on-a-chip sort of things specifically designed for industrial applications not only still out there in the world, but still being actively manufactured that are based on the 486 architecture.
For retro gaming nerds, their 486 machines would all be running some variant of DOS anyway.
I don’t have a 486. I don’t know anyone who has a 486. I wouldn’t know what to do with a 486. I know full well that all versions before 7.1 will be fully usable forever and that someone would fork the kernel if they actually needed to run modern Linux on a 486.
And still this makes me a little bit sad and angry.
The only people I see doing anything with a 486 are pointless challenge videos getting something modern to run on old hardware for kicks. Tiny population.
I think the main impact here is that there are plenty of embedded system-on-a-chip sort of things specifically designed for industrial applications not only still out there in the world, but still being actively manufactured that are based on the 486 architecture.
For retro gaming nerds, their 486 machines would all be running some variant of DOS anyway.
How many of those are getting continuously updated to the latest mainline kernel though?
Absolutely none of them.
Source: some tools that are a part of my job run these kinds of machines
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