I read this article https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/27/fedora_starts_to_simplify_linux/. The question is whether we can still use old laptops. I have an HP 6710b and it works very well at the moment with Fedora 36. In this case, my opinion is that the development team will release a special Fedora Spin for laptops with old hardware. What do you think?
On Wed, 2022-04-27 at 19:10 +0000, Cătălin George Feștilă wrote:
I read this article https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/27/fedora_starts_to_simplify_linux/ The question is whether we can still use old laptops. I have an HP 6710b and it works very well at the moment with Fedora 36.
I think the answer's going to depend on the age.
I have a 2007 era laptop that still works, though its battery doesn't, and is painfully burdened by modern Gnome. But managed Gnome from way back then quite acceptably. It has a no-longer supported NVidia graphics chipset (NVidia removed drivers for that model some time ago).
Fedora on it is not feasible anymore (unless using one of the really un-featured graphical systems or just plain text mode), but it's still okay with Linux Mint - its Mate implementation is far less CPU heavy, and doesn't glitch graphically like Fedora's does. My impression of things like Mate or traditional Gnome on Fedora is that they're using the full-blown Gnome 3 and just styling it to look in the old manner.
It's *very* old, virtually obsolete in computing terms. Yet, it's fine for some things. It's wasteful to just chuck it away, and I don't have the money to just buy a new one. I can certainly understand a 2007 device being considered far too old to bother with, even if I consider more recent OSs to have become too bloated (inefficient) as the real problem. A 1.73 GHz dual CPU with 1 gig of RAM (or I may have upgraded it to 2 gigs) isn't exactly a low spec machine.
On 27 Apr 2022, at 20:11, Cătălin George Feștilă mythcat@fedoraproject.org wrote:
I read this article https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/27/fedora_starts_to_simplify_linux/. The question is whether we can still use old laptops. I have an HP 6710b and it works very well at the moment with Fedora 36. In this case, my opinion is that the development team will release a special Fedora Spin for laptops with old hardware. What do you think?
The usual issue with old hardware is the lack of people to do the work. And the lack of hardware for interested people to test on.
Barry
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On Thu, 28 Apr 2022 at 18:18, Barry barry@barrys-emacs.org wrote:
On 27 Apr 2022, at 20:11, Cătălin George Feștilă <
mythcat@fedoraproject.org> wrote:
I read this article
https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/27/fedora_starts_to_simplify_linux/.
The question is whether we can still use old laptops. I have an HP 6710b
and it works very well at the moment with Fedora 36.
In this case, my opinion is that the development team will release a
special Fedora Spin for laptops with old hardware. What do you think?
The usual issue with old hardware is the lack of people to do the work. And the lack of hardware for interested people to test on.
Many of us have old hardware that still meets our needs and live off a pension that has not kept pace with inflation. There are, however,many younger people who don't have legacy hardware and can't afford new mainstream PC's. (One difference is that older users often have printers that lack drivers for recent distros and non-amd64 hardware).
Thanks to Windows 10+11, there has been a glut of middle-aged hardware at prices even schools can afford. There is also new hardware using ARM processors (e.g., Raspberry Pi 4) that are comparable to 10+ year-old laptop hardware. High-end laptop models a fews old that have broken screens or keyboards but are still perfectly functional (with external keyboards and screens) can be found on local buy-and-sell sites. In my area such systems are being given away or sold for under $100 with 128GB SSD.
In my view, https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/raspberry-pi/ should be encouraged (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/n5aew0/fedora_on_raspberry_pi_4/). Many older as well as potential new users can benefit from modern low-cost hardware, but work is needed to make installation on RPi4 as easy and robust as it is on current amd64 hardware.
Once upon a time, George N. White III gnwiii@gmail.com said:
In my view, https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/raspberry-pi/ should be encouraged (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/n5aew0/fedora_on_raspberry_pi_4/). Many older as well as potential new users can benefit from modern low-cost hardware, but work is needed to make installation on RPi4 as easy and robust as it is on current amd64 hardware.
Raspberry Pi in particular is problematic and outside Fedora's control, somewhat similar to nVidia GPUs. There are undocumented things, closed source blobs, etc. that make it hard to reliably support Pi. It's really unfortunate that the Pi dominates the small board space.
On Fri, 2022-04-29 at 10:21 -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
Raspberry Pi in particular is problematic and outside Fedora's control, somewhat similar to nVidia GPUs. There are undocumented things, closed source blobs, etc. that make it hard to reliably support Pi. It's really unfortunate that the Pi dominates the small board space.
I'd not looked at Raspberry Pi, but a quick look now I see a post saying it's open-source, and another saying it's not. Well, that's as clear as mud.
But as far as obsoleting general purpose PC hardware, that ways were already discovered to make use of it years ago, that isn't in the same position as close-source hardware that no-one knows how to use.
And, sure, I get it that if NVidia hasn't updated their blob to run on the newer systems with different requirements, that's not *easy* to deal with. But people have decompiled things before. And does the old blob not run on a new OS simply for that reason? Or is it that someone has drawn a line in the sand and said too old, don't care.
If it's a desktop PC it's feasible to switch the graphics hardware, not so with most laptops. Often it was never interchangeable, and even if it was, that was years ago on a proprietary bit of hardware.
What I find is that as the years roll on, bloating has set in. As hardware has become more impressive, software has become less efficient because it can get away with it.
Ignoring a 1 MHz Z80 toy computer I had, my first real personal computer was a 7MHz 32-bit computer with about 1 meg of RAM, and could cold-boot in 16 seconds off it's 40 MB IDE HDD. It was a remarkable efficient thing.
Modern PCs have better hardware than ye olde mainframes costing the GDP of small countries, and running their government, or defense system, or banking systems. I should be able to do live 3D photorealistic ray tracing with modern PCs, by comparison. Yet, my 2GHz 64-bit quad-CPU with 16 gigs of RAM takes longer to boot-up, and requires ridiculous hardware specs to just get the desktop up. That's before actually running a program.
Computers have always been a bit of an environmental disaster, and every now and then there's a large wave of dumping because of a fundamental shift somewhere in the commercial side of computing. There's one right now, with Windows refusing to run on what it considers obsolete hardware. Linux *used* to be one of the stop-gaps that made use of otherwise discarded hardware.
On 2022-04-27 13:10, Cătălin George Feștilă wrote:
I read this article https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/27/fedora_starts_to_simplify_linux/. The question is whether we can still use old laptops. I have an HP 6710b and it works very well at the moment with Fedora 36. In this case, my opinion is that the development team will release a special Fedora Spin for laptops with old hardware. What do you think? _______________________________________________
I read this article and started thinking if it is time to ditch Fedora.
I am finding many applications that I use are no longer being supported on Fedora or there are not enough people working to keep applications updated. I have started to use SNAP software to get current versions or applications at all.
I have tried Gnome but will stick with KDE. KDE is going downhill. It isn't all of Fedora teams fault.
If I have to stick with an old version to keep my hardware working or change to a different version of Linux, then I will. I will change all my machines.
I know another person that is still on F33 due to changes that he has not been able to get working on his network and is concerned about this as well.
On 5/2/22 01:02, Robin Laing wrote:
On 2022-04-27 13:10, Cătălin George Feștilă wrote:
I read this article https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/27/fedora_starts_to_simplify_linux/. The question is whether we can still use old laptops. I have an HP 6710b and it works very well at the moment with Fedora 36. In this case, my opinion is that the development team will release a special Fedora Spin for laptops with old hardware. What do you think? _______________________________________________
I read this article and started thinking if it is time to ditch Fedora.
You should verify the contents of an article before you start believing it like that.
On Mon, 2022-05-02 at 02:02 -0600, Robin Laing wrote:
I am finding many applications that I use are no longer being supported on Fedora or there are not enough people working to keep applications updated. I have started to use SNAP software to get current versions or applications at all.
I think you'll find that problem across various different distros. There's a push for one or more types of so-called universal packate (snap, appimage), where one file supposedly runs on different distros.
While the idea sounds good in practice, and probably suits some people who want to be the sole distributor/compiler of their program, the trouble is that all the OSs are different and you find things don't work on some distros. Then you'll get told to switch distros, instead of them fixing the problem (if they even can).
I find I can't print with these things, I have to export a PDF file and print that. It's a cumbersome annoyance. And at some stage the PDF application will probably become an appimage, and I won't be able to print from that.
Another problem is that we'll step away from one big advantage Fedora, Ubuntu et al, have: Their own file repositories. Currently, issuing a simple "yum update" or "dnf update" updates *all* your software, when you want to.
When you move away from everything comes from your repos, to everything comes from somewhere else, you go back to the Windows model; where you have to manually update each program, or each program checks for updates when you fire it up (delaying you using it). And programs install auto-launchers that run every time you log in, so a dozen different things all check home with mummy to see if they need updating.
On Mon, 2 May 2022 at 20:30, Tim via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Mon, 2022-05-02 at 02:02 -0600, Robin Laing wrote:
I am finding many applications that I use are no longer being supported on Fedora or there are not enough people working to keep applications updated. I have started to use SNAP software to get current versions or applications at all.
I think you'll find that problem across various different distros. There's a push for one or more types of so-called universal packate (snap, appimage), where one file supposedly runs on different distros.
While the idea sounds good in practice, and probably suits some people who want to be the sole distributor/compiler of their program, the trouble is that all the OSs are different and you find things don't work on some distros. Then you'll get told to switch distros, instead of them fixing the problem (if they even can).
Developers want to bypass the linux distros to get more control over the artifacts they produce (applications, libraries, data sets). It is not unusual to find that distros ship old or incomplete versions of artifacts.
Many artifacts have a long list of optional features, so each distro may select a different configuration.
I find I can't print with these things, I have to export a PDF file and print that. It's a cumbersome annoyance. And at some stage the PDF application will probably become an appimage, and I won't be able to print from that.
Another problem is that we'll step away from one big advantage Fedora, Ubuntu et al, have: Their own file repositories. Currently, issuing a simple "yum update" or "dnf update" updates *all* your software, when you want to.
This requires packagers who are knowledgeable in building packages, but also in the use cases for each package so they can make appropriate choices. Over the years I have seen many cases where packagers who didn't understand how the packages are used made configuration choices that didn't work for important segments of their user community.
When you move away from everything comes from your repos, to everything comes from somewhere else, you go back to the Windows model; where you have to manually update each program, or each program checks for updates when you fire it up (delaying you using it). And programs install auto-launchers that run every time you log in, so a dozen different things all check home with mummy to see if they need updating.
There are many 3rd party package repositories. One class uses distro packaging so you can add the repository to your package manager configuration. There are also "archive networks" (CPAN, CTAN, and CRAN) with their own package managers, which creates a need for dummy packages so the 3rd party packages can satisfy requirements of distro packages. These XXAN's often rely on the efforts a few key individuals, so old age, disease, natural and unnatural disasters, etc. can be very disruptive. Conda packages are another class which provides a basic python environment for many platforms, together with conda-forge for 3rd party packages.
ti, 2022-05-03 kello 08:59 +0930, Tim via users kirjoitti:
When you move away from everything comes from your repos, to everything comes from somewhere else, you go back to the Windows model; where you have to manually update each program, or each program checks for updates when you fire it up (delaying you using it).
Gnome Software, at least, will happily update both your RPMs and your Flatpaks.
On Tue, 3 May 2022 at 05:00, Matti Pulkkinen mkjpul@utu.fi wrote:
ti, 2022-05-03 kello 08:59 +0930, Tim via users kirjoitti:
When you move away from everything comes from your repos, to everything comes from somewhere else, you go back to the Windows model; where you have to manually update each program, or each program checks for updates when you fire it up (delaying you using it).
Gnome Software, at least, will happily update both your RPMs and your Flatpaks.
But only when the stars are properly aligned. It is more accurate to say the intention is that Gnome Software will update both (using packagekit).
I do try to use Gnome Software for updates, but prefer dnf when I need a not-installed package. Software Update stopped working on one system under Fedora 34 (fresh install), but has been working since upgrading to Fedora 35. Another system (upgraded over multiple Fedora versions) has been updating reliably with Fedora 35, but did have transient problems with previous versions of Fedora.
Matti Pulkkinen:
Gnome Software, at least, will happily update both your RPMs and your Flatpaks.
George N. White III:
But only when the stars are properly aligned. It is more accurate to say the intention is that Gnome Software will update both (using packagekit).
Oh the irony of the naming, "flatpaks." What's the worst way of fitting new furniture into your house? Some guys deliver it ready-made and carry it into your house, or you buy a box of bits (probably missing some of them) from Ikea and try to assemble it yourself? ;-)
Yes, I know the metaphor isn't exactly equal (since *YOU* don't assemble the software), I'm just amused by the choice of name.
I've used these precompiled packages on Linux and Mac, the convenience of just one binary blob installs by dragging and dropping it wherever you like (which may well mean that each user has their own duplicate, rather than a system install), and simply running it "as-is" is quite handy. But I've found they often don't work fully. It's quite likely you'd need a custom precompiled blob from them for your particular distro for it to be fully functional.
The example I keep bringing up, because it's so damn annoying and stupid, is apps that can't print, even after several years of bug reports. I mean, come on, we've had working IPP and CUPS for decades. It's no secret how to print through them, nor that you're going to go through them to print, they all know the distros use them. Everybody else managed it.
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