its crazy that we treat the most unbelievably advanced machines most people will ever have direct access to as completely disposable

Outside of gaming the requirement for new hardware literally only seems to cover the endless abstraction slop that businesses use to push out more features faster. Meanwhile the product I’m using hasn’t changed at all in the last 10 years, continues to have the same bugs yet now requires an nvme ssd and 500 core 800 watt cpu to run to deliver the same functionality as 10 years ago.

I can’t think of a single thing literally ANY of the software that I use has changed in any meaningful way since the 90s other than getting bigger and slower.

Actually games aren’t even immune from this Unreal Engine is prime abstraction slop because shitting out crap matters more than making anything good. God forbid anyone get the time to make their own engines no just ram a barely working open world game into an engine that barely supports rendering more than 3 people on the screen without shitting the bed.

Yes mr nvidia sir i will buy you 1000 watt electric heater to run this mid ass game that hasn’t innovated on shit all since the ps2 era. Ray tracing you say? Wow this really enhances my experience of point to point repetitive collect 20 boar arse mmo ass gameplay ass shit with AI that’s still as rudimentary as guards in hitman 2 silent assassin

It’s very deliberate and forced, the software side justifications for requiring mid-to-high tier hardware produced in the last 5-6 years are incredibly weak.

Entirely related, hardware from said time period also suffers increasingly from planned obsolescence and expensive upselling.

This is way worse with . A few years is ancient to a lot of them to play some unoptimized slop made with unreal engine on the lowest settings.

Ngl, if you have computer hardware 10-15 years old, be prepared to replace it anyway, that's about the longest I've kept a GPU alive. Though I do otherwise agree. I have an AMD rx480 that is a perfectly serviceable card, except that AMD dropped support for it several years ago. Moreover, it's been 10 years and AMDs drivers are still ass. Every year I go 'oh, this will be the year of the AMD GPU' and every year I am shockingly wrong. My Nvidia rtx3060 is starting to show it's age a bit. Not too much, but enough that I am considering an upgrade. I wouldn't care so much of I could use the 480 for compute but nope.

Won't fix the people saying this stuff, but in case you werent aware there are some specific linux distros that are designed specifically to cater to older hardware. antiX Linux for example. Based on debian stable, and goes the extra mile to support older hardware, and 32 bit systems.

To play devils advocate, it can be really hard to maintain an ever increasing list of hardware to support. Especially when new hardware have new features that then require special care to handle between devices, and further segment feature sets.

To support every device that came before it, also requires devs to have said hardware to test with, lest they release a buggy build and get more complaints. If devs are already strapped for time on the new and currently supported devices, spending any more time to ensure compatibility with a 10-15 year old piece of hardware that has a couple dozen active users is probably off the table.

See 32bit support for Linux. I get why they're dropping support but I also don't like it. In Linux, there's basically a parallel set of libraries for i386. These libraries need maintenance and testing to ensure they're not creating vulnerabilities. As the kernel grows, it essentially doubles any work to ensure things build and behave correctly for old CPUs, CPUs that may lack a lot of hardware features that have come to be expected today.

People also will like to say "oh but xyz runs just as good/bad as my 15-20 year old computer, why do we need NEW???". Power, it's power use. The amount of compute you get for the amount of power for modern chipsets is incomparable. Using old computers for menial tasks is essentially leaving a toaster oven running to heat your room.

It really is the intersection of capitalism that makes this so difficult. Really many computer users in the global south have much older hardware than is available in the imperial core, but a majority of development happens in the imperial core in terms of software maintenance and so there's a purposeful disconnect between manufacturers and users.

Libre operating systems have been a lot better at this, but we see the shortage of labor and expertise a lot and when hardware companies make bone headed moves like nvidia restricting their newer drivers to newer cards there's really nothing we can do on our side besides keep packaging legacy drivers.

It doesnt help that newer computer products have become more hostile to user repairs and have built in lifespans with soldered SSDs.

32 Bit computers are going to have to go away at some point though due to the 2038 problem (unless the intention is to not ever connect to the Internet on those devices anymore). So at the very least its a legimitimate hardware limitation.

IMO, this is less of a problem with the attitude of people and more of a problem of the logic of the whole computing sector. The idea that old parts will be deprecated in the future isn't just accepted, it's desired. The sector's goal is the fastest possible development, and development does happen. A graphics card from 15 years ago is, for all intents and purposes, a piece of electronic junk, 10 times slower and 5 times less energy efficient. This has to do with the extremely fast development of computer parts, which is the paradigm of the field.

In order to maintain 10-15 year-old parts, you'd have to stop or to slow the development speed of the sector. There are arguments to be made for that, especially from an environmental point of view, but as the sector is, you simply cannot expect there to be support for something working 10 times slower than contemporary counterparts.

10-15 years

Try 10-15 months

At the end of the day, it takes a lot of effort to keep hardware device drivers up-to-date to work with newer software. Of course hardware should be designed for long term support, and at least have enough documentation to make that possible. But it's also hard when there aren't many people in the "community" who even have certain hardware to test out. And it takes work to even support any given hardware device in the first place, especially without documentation. And if you're talking about graphics cards specifically, they're really complex compared to most hardware devices, and have changed a lot over the last 10-20 years. But with Linux, there just isn't the necessary labor to support so much stuff.

I'm still using an amd 390x, which admittedly is almost 10 years old, but it still runs most almost-modern stuff pretty well. But I have started to run into a few games where it just straight up won't play the game at all because it doesn't support dx12 or something (looking at you, marvel rivals ) . Stopped getting updated drivers like 5 years back lol.

i just play chess on browser and i have this old hp laptop with intel core i5 vpro tm according to the sticker and my laptop except the dead battery is still usable also it has partial passkey and experimental uefi support . except passkey i am using experimental uefi with no problem on linux and bsd and i think i am going to use this laptop for more 5 yr . idk what obsolete you are talking about . blender , obs and godot works on my system and on windows blender and obs showed errors due to hardware requirement

Hardware just gets better really quickly, GPU's have been roughly doubling in power every two generations. Why wouldn't developers take advantage of that to make games that look amazing?

Honestly though, it's mostly just a gaming problem. I have, among other computers, a 16 year old laptop that does perfectly fine for everything that isn't running modern videogames (and even then I can still run older titles). Sure, 4GB RAM means I sometimes have to do things one at a time, but old hardware works surprisingly well. x86_64 came out 22 years ago, so if anything it's surprising that so much is only dropping 32 bit support now.

Phones, on the other hand, are a much more abysmal landscape than computers. A lot of Androids will only get like 3 years of updates, and even the longer supported phones like iPhones and Google Pixels will get a mere 6-8 years of updates.

I would simply not play video games. For everything else, my 15yo ThinkPads are plenty snappy.

$250 ish is the median monthly wage in my country. i always cringe when they say this.

My first server was setup on decade old hardware and ran like a champ. Old hardware is great if your don't get hung up over graphs trying to tell you it's not