In the mailing list of another project, I just had to deal with a user who
is bothered that we don't support 8 and 16 bit machines and that we don't
try to "push the envelope while being universally compatible."

Of course that person isn't volunteering to help. The reality is that we
have an extremely limited pool of volunteers to do work and we must
prioritize what we work upon. It's Open Source software, and if there is a
retrocomputing audience that can self-support, they can. But what we mostly
see is folks who don't help, don't necessarily even *use* a 32-bit machine,
but demand we continue to support them on rather nebulous policy grounds.

On Mon, Jan 15, 2024 at 2:29 AM Ottavio Caruso via Dng <dng@???>
wrote:

> Am 15/01/2024 um 09:44 schrieb Fierelier:
> > As spoken about in this thread <
> https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=6266>,
> > Debian seems to be looking to discontinue support for x86 machines. I
> find this
> > choice somewhat questionable, since these machines are quite capable
> still, in
> > my eyes. I could daily drive my Pentium M 1.2GHz if I needed to, and I
> have
> > sometimes used that machine for extensive periods of time, exclusively.
> >
> > ...yet, I'm close to giving up on this platform, I feel like the walls
> have been
> > moving in for a long time:
> > * Many distros are discontinuing x86
> > * Browsers are all f*cked-up (in general), and ignore my build
> preferences in
> > some cases, failing to compile without SSE2/SSE3
> > * Clang and Rust use the wrong definitions for i686, breaking some
> software on
> > non-SSE2 capable machines. No desire from these teams to fix
> > * Software is generally getting worse, with people just jumping on
> whatever new
> > *shiny* things come out (GTK3/GTK4 are mostly pointless, slow and buggy,
> yet
> > everyone adapts them)
> > * It's difficult to run older software on Linux. I'm trying to develop
> software
> > to resolve this, but right now, things really still feel disconnected
> between
> > the old and new software spheres
> >
> > An old x86 laptop is what truly got me into Linux in the first place.
> I've been
> > working on debloating my entire suite of software, crafting replacements
> with
> > the limited inspiration I have, for things that I don't consider good.
> But it
> > really feels like things are coming to an end, this time.
> >
> > I assume Devuan will adapt Debian's upstream behavior of i386, and also
> drop it
> > eventually. But I'm still curious to hear, what is the official stance
> on this?
> >
> > Link <https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=6349&action=new>
> >
>
>
> Found this on the forum (via gmane). I don't do web forums any more but
> this is an interesting topic.
>
> --
> Ottavio Caruso
>
> A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
> Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
> A: Top-posting.
> Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
>
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>


--
Bruce Perens K6BP