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. 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. However, to get back to the topic at hand, old atoms being used by radio nerds and cavers, effectively as convenient form-factor 'embedded' devices, do not actually care whether the time ABI changes or not. They are not (SFAIK) running proprietary windows binaries or games, so the debate about how long support is maintained, at least for this type of usage, is independent of the 'should the i386 ABI switch along with other 32-bit ABIs'. Switching or not (so long as the fairly small subset of the distro we use keeps working) would not affect our usage of the device, for example. So if we could try and consider these questions separately, that would be helpful. Wookey -- Principal hats: Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
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