On Tue, 2016-09-06 at 21:33 -0400, JMZ wrote: > Hi Ryan, > > When you say "Ubuntu 16.10" I wonder if you mean that you are > running > gnome with the unity shell or just the command line only. Running any > of > the graphical enviroments (save maybe lxde) on a 80586 would be > pretty > exceptional. > >
> Pentium 4/4 HT systems (which are still 80586 chipset basically) can > be > got even at community trash dumps. If you're starting a school, > setting > up donated Pentium 4's and old dual-cores with Lubuntu or another > lxde > distro might be your best bet. This is especially true if all > you're > running is Firefox and LibreOffice, or similar. > Is this even worth the resources? There are multiple issues here, most obvious being the distinction between a current-generation operating system (Ubuntu) and a special-purpose software project (to target legacy hardware). Is legacy 32-bit support part of Ubuntu's mission, or are resources best diverted to improving the system for the other 99.99% of use cases? Like it or not, i586 is probably less than one in ten thousand installations. E-waste reuse is itself an economics issue. We like to think we can donate those systems to some poor people somewhere; but that has a huge array of complexities: * Humans have to eat, among other things, and so their labor time is at a premium: you trade the labor time to produce one good for the labor time to produce another, e.g. food, and thus any volunteered time is a real cost paid by the volunteer; * Collecting, sorting, and shipping those things takes human labor; * The logistics takes an immense amount of labor: who gets these computers, what are their requirements, how do we optimize the benefit for their particular poverty case, and so forth; * The targets of e-waste reuse are frequently poor nations with unreliable or expensive access to electricity and even waste disposal E-waste reuse can actually cost as much or more than new production, and has runtime costs because it's less-efficient to use, maintain, and even power. Collecting, inventorying, and preparing e-waste as a refurbished good incurs more labor per unit than rolling new units off an assembly line; the cost advantage depends on if the components cost more than the additional labor. Even then, there's a lot of cost in developing the logistics of using something out-of-date in a modern environment. Even if you can co-opt slave labor into the deal, is supporting this kind of specialized use costly for the Ubuntu maintainers? Just running a build of the OS as 32-bit is inadequate; with the broad range of out-of-date hardware left behind by modern system software, you'd need to respond to ad-hoc support issues with varied hardware configurations breaking because all hardware configurations used in that context are uncommon by nature. That in an of itself seems to warrant a project specially dedicated to e-waste reuse programs, rather than a best-effort and costly nod to the concept of older systems. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
