One is in lives in Brazil and I think the other lives in the Middle East. They both have old second hand 32 bit laptops from the 00's.
> but you seem to paint it as some kind of affordability frontier...
Yes because there are people still using old hardware because they have no choice. Also, whats the problem with supporting old architectures? Plan 9 solved the portability problem and a prominent user recently ported it to cheap MIPS routers so we can run Plan 9 on cheap second hand network hardware. We have the tool chain support so we use it.
And believe me, I understand a raspberry pi or whatever is much faster and uses less power but I would rather we reduce e-waste where possible. I still run old 32 bit systems because they work and I have them.
> whats the problem with supporting old architectures?
It's not free, it's not easy, and it introduces hard to test and rarely run code paths that may or may not have problems on the target architecture.
I think there's a pretty strong argument for running hardware produced in the last 10 years for the next 10 or 20 years. However, I think it should be recognized that there was massive advances in compute power from 2000 to 2010 that didn't happen from 2010 to 2025.
A Core 2 Quad (produced in 2010) has ~ 1/2 the performance of the N150 (1/4 the single core performance of the latest AMD 9950).
Meanwhile a Pentium 3 from 2000 has roughly 1/10th the performance of the same Core 2 Quad.
There are simply far fewer differences between CPUs made in 2010 and today vs CPUs made in 2000 to 2010. Even the instruction set has basically become static at this point. AVX isn't that different from SSE and there's really not a whole bunch of new instructions since the x64 update.
> There are simply far fewer differences between CPUs made in 2010 and today vs CPUs made in 2000 to 2010.
I have stopped replacing machines (and smartphones) because they became outdated: the vast majority of compile tasks is finished in a fraction of a second, applications basically load instantly from SSD, and I never run out of RAM. The main limiting factor in my day-to-day use is network latency - and nothing's going to solve that.
My main machine is a Ryzen 9 3900X with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. And honestly? It's probably overkill. It's on the replacement list due to physical issues - not because I believe I'll significantly benefit from the performance improvements of a current-gen replacement. I'm hoping it'll last until AM6 comes around!
Every task is either "basically instantly", "finishes in a sip of coffee", or "slow enough for a pee break / email response / lunch break". Computers aren't improving enough to make my tasks upgrade to a faster category, so why bother?
> It's not free, it's not easy, and it introduces hard to test and rarely run code paths that may or may not have problems on the target architecture.
If your platform is designed properly it isn't much of an issue. This was bought up at a recent 9front hackathon and the lead dev stated that there is no reason to drop 386 or arm32. In fact, he said they are great test beds for shaking out cross platform bugs and tests all changes on 32 bit before committing.
Also, performance means nothing if the hardware is already there and capable of the job at hand.
One is in lives in Brazil and I think the other lives in the Middle East. They both have old second hand 32 bit laptops from the 00's.
> but you seem to paint it as some kind of affordability frontier...
Yes because there are people still using old hardware because they have no choice. Also, whats the problem with supporting old architectures? Plan 9 solved the portability problem and a prominent user recently ported it to cheap MIPS routers so we can run Plan 9 on cheap second hand network hardware. We have the tool chain support so we use it.
And believe me, I understand a raspberry pi or whatever is much faster and uses less power but I would rather we reduce e-waste where possible. I still run old 32 bit systems because they work and I have them.