On Wed, 2023-05-31 at 19:48 +0100, Wookey wrote: > On 2023-05-31 07:29 -0500, John Goerzen wrote: > > > > Hanging on to systems using power-hungry chips from 20 years ago instead > > > of > > > intercepting a system such as this is not reducing the number of computers > > > that end up in the waste stream, it just keeps you stuck with a more > > > power-hungry system. > > a) That's not necessarily a problem if the machine is running from a > renewable supply. The issue is emissions, not power consumption per > se.
Thankfully I have a spiritual power filter[1] based on anthroposophic principles that makes my computers consume only renewable energy ;-) > and b) as both John and I have pointed out there are low-power i386 > systems still in use. > > c) it's not our choice to make. If people insist on using more > electricity than they need to for their computing, that's on them. > (we > enable enormous amounts of this already - old i386 systems probably > barely register at this point) > > Debian should be supporting people using whatever suits them where > that effort is reasonably proportionate. We are not driven by the > 'sell new stuff' goals of hardware manufactuers so we should IMHO be > erring on the side of keeping stuff going as long as there is > sufficient community support. I doubt we have that, see some of the issues listed for i386 on https://release.debian.org/testing/arch_qualify.html I would not be surprised if we consider dropping leaf software where builds start to hit the address space limit (I expect browsers & such). Plus the broken FPU implementation as we don't require SSE. And it *is* our choice to make to not spend time on dead architectures. Ansgar [1]: It also works for other carbon emissions!
