Re: Planned obsolescence ?

Hello everyone.




I educate people about free software and help them with migrations from 
proprietary OSes to free ones, and one of the main arguments for free 
software deployment that I often use when communicating with someone asking 
me what to do with an old computer is that their hardware is still supported
by free operating systems and can continue to be safely operated for many 
years. I've already done a triple digit number of migrations/installations 
and would like to continue doing so until something stops me.




Please do not underestimate the number of people still using old hardware 
(even i686). Especially people from poor countries and hardware enthusiasts,
whose groups are growing more and more in these years and who help keeping 
free software alive, would be affected by bad decisions. It is not even a 
month since I helped a friend migrate his 32-bit Sony Vaio laptop to Debian 
12. After replacing the hard drive with an SSD, the laptop came to life 
incredibly and became usable again, and not only for office work. And it is 
precisely the support of old hardware that brings more and more new people 
to the world of Linux and free software after the unfortunate decisions of 
Microsoft, and that is a label free software cannot afford to lose. 




This has the potential to disrupt the favorable trend of people moving away 
from proprietary systems. I kindly ask you for reconsideration.




I believe that a lot of software has gradually reached a point where its 
demands, given the features it offers, are no longer growing as much as they
used to, and so if we don't waste resources by making the resulting binary 
code inefficient, the old hardware will continue to be sufficient for many 
scenarios (and for many years to come).




Thank you.




Regards,

Jaromir



---------- Původní e-mail ----------
Od: Riccardo Mottola <[email protected]>
Komu: Romain Dolbeau <[email protected]>, [email protected]
Kopie: [email protected], [email protected], 
[email protected]
Datum: 30. 10. 2025 10:25:17
Předmět: Re: Planned obsolescence ?
"Hi All, 

Romain Dolbeau wrote: 
> Debian is (at least up to now) the Linux distribution one could rely 
> on to support hardware as long as its actual life without forcing 
> users to upgrade. I have ~2007 (Penryn) systems still in use that were 
> deployed with Debian when new, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. If 
> it ain't broke, don't fix it, just upgrade Debian:-) 
> 
> Debian isn't Microsoft. Debian isn't Apple. Debian isn't Google. 
> Please don't learn the wrong lessons from them. Planned obsolescence 
> is bad, not good. 

I stand to  Romain. Long-term support also means less electronic waste, 
less consumism. 
10 years might be for a laptop - although a good number now shows 20 
years can be done if they were a lucky model, but certain embedded 
boards, servers are still working very well. Think about ThinkPad T 
series, PowerMac G3 & G4, Sun UltraSPARC system. 

Of course, certain pieces of software may be not useful with limited RAM 
or single-core CPUs, but others to perfectly fine. 

Main issue is of course Kernel, toolchain and for laptops & 
workstations, video card support. 

Riccardo 

"