Feyter

This is perfect for people planing to get pulled over and have to explain sone things, on an airport …

there are problems with the old driver? Man you think at some point a tecnology is just complete, but apparently no.

I think there is a lot that the author is right about.

However, removing X11 season was a decision of the Gnome Team not the Ubuntu team and I completely respect this.

Yes you can keep shipping it with the X11 optio, but someone has to maintain it. The gnome project has only limited resource so it’s either removed or an unstable mess… removing in this case is always the better option IMHO.

I think the core takeaways from all this is, we (as a community) should definitely no longer recommend Ubuntu as the default distro for newcomer to the Linux world.

We all have been idiot savants at some point of our lifes :)

I’m pretty sure those machines still run WinXP at best ;)

And yes that’s exactly what I said. You still can run Linux on a 486 for this special edge cases, it’s just that the Linux Kernel team will no longer provide the service for maintaining it. If it is such an important thing for crucial industry machines, they can definitely pay someone patching it back in.

For the overwhelmingly majority of Linux use cases it’s not a concern anymore. So why should they do the extra work, instead of spending the time elsewhere?

Exactly! Just because there is support for a stone age CPU in the Linux Kernel, doesn’t mean every single modern Linux compatible software is running smoothly on this.

Of course, from the Mac/Windows point of view it was the correct thing to ditch such old stuff. Because they are concerned about having a stable product that is running on modern hardware. Keeping this old stuff in, makes it more complicated to maintain their system and therefore more suspectable to errors.

Linux could only keep this support up for so long, because somewhere there where people that though it would be worth care about for 28 years. And even now it’s not over. You can modify the kernel and patch 486 support back in again on your own. So “incompatibility” doesn’t really exist with a open system. It’s just that nobody at the core kernel team will do this service for you anymore.