• dan@upvote.au
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Friendly reminder that Debian still has an i686 build that in theory supports processors as old as the Pentium 4, and they only dropped their i586 build (that went back to the original Pentium) this year.

    • qyron@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      Debian sometimes feels like the system that will run on a salad bowl powered by two potatoes and a pickled cucumber.

      The range of architectures it supports is mindboggling.

      • dan@upvote.au
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        It’s definitely awesome.

        Interestingly/amazingly, it doesn’t support all the architectures that the kernel supports. The kernel still supports 486 processors, although modern Linux on a 486 would actually be extremely slow since all the modern CPU capabilities/extensions are missing. There was talk about removing 486 support last year (increasing the minimum CPU for the Linux kernel up to the Pentium 1) but I don’t think that’s actually gone anywhere yet.

      • dan@upvote.au
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        It’s probably mostly legacy systems for things like industrial automation.

        You can actually still buy industrial motherboards with ISA and PCI slots, for both older CPUs (like the Pentium 4) and newer CPUs (like modern-ish Core i3/i5/i7). There’s also clone CPUs that behave the same as older ones.

        A lot of industrial systems are big, expensive, last a long time, and were designed for use with particular hardware, which is why there’s a pretty decent market for clones of old hardware.

        Having said that… I’m not sure they’d use a newer operating system on these systems. The OS they run is likely 20 years old too. So… To answer your question, I’m not sure. Retro hardware enthusiasts tend to use an OS from the same time period.