This is great! I have managed to get a few kernel panics on my system related to Steam and NTFS drives.
I have a shared HDD formated to NTFS that I have imported to Steam as a library. It sometimes that HDD is not mounted at boot due to some error, which have resulted in me installing the same game on my main drive. When I later tried mount my old HDD and import the Steam library my computer just froze. Every time I opened Steam after that the kernel panicked. I didn’t know it was a kernel panic at the time. I ended up dismounting the NTFS drive and uninstalling the duplicate games.
I wonder if I can dig up the old kernel panic logs with this.
I would say for as long as the hardware remains useful. A high end laptop may still be perfectly usable in 15 years if the hardware doesn’t fail by then.
Still using a 5 year old laptop with no degradation in performance and expecting at least another 5. All I had to do was uninstall some malware that was eating up all the system resources and popping up a bunch of ads. It was called Windows. :-D
Usually, my computers dropped in performance after around 10 years. They might contain parts that are a few years older by that time. So, to be able to use them further, I would suggest a minimum of 15 years.
Good point. If I know it’ll meet my needs, I’m sometimes inclined to buy tech that’s a few years old, especially if the newer version just adds cloud, AI, or something else I don’t want/need. In many cases it’s still marketed the same so I think end of support dates should be clearly marked on the product itself so the consumer can make an informed choice. Intentionally bricking a device should be treated as littering and the company should be responsible for disposal fees.
Linux is a different story because of the volunteer presence. If anything Linux should get subsidies for keeping e-waste out of landfills after the manufacturer has long abandoned the product.
My laptop is about 5 years old now and still runs as fast as the day I bought it, if not faster. I replaced the battery twice, but this thing could go another 5-10 years if I don’t drop it or spill something on it.
As long as someone is willing and able to maintain it.
It’s open source. All the work is either done by volunteers or by corporate sponsors. If it’s worth it for you to keep a GPU from the 90s running on modern kernels and you can submit patches to keep up with API changes, then no reason to remove it. The problem isn’t that the hardware is old, it’s that people don’t have the time to do the maintenance
However, when it comes to any proprietary hardware/software the solution is simple. All companies should be required by law to open source all software and drivers, regardless of age, when the discontinued support; including server side code if the product is dependent on one (massive for gaming).
it’s not that wild of a concept, it’s basically just an extension of how copyright and patents expire. You should have to prove that your IP is actually in use for it to remain valid, otherwise you forfeit it. Honestly moreso to prevent patent/copyright trolling than for right to repair reasons.
There’s a good argument for more modular kernels (microkernels and such). That way the driver could be kept going for decades, only updating the IPC protocol as the microkernel changes through time
I do not think that can be determined in the tech space with ‘age’ alone. Popularity, usability and performance are much more important factors.
It was already brought up in another comment, the gtx 1000th gen, is a nice example. The gtx 1080 is after 8 years still a valid GPU to use in gaming and the 1050 a nice little efficient cheap video encode engine which supports almost all modern widespread codecs and settings (except AV1).
support should drop when we hit the sweat spot where the energy saving from running modern RISC devices over old CISC outweighs the energy cost of manufacturing replacements.
Def proton mail. I was using spark for my other accounts and it was pretty good. Then i got a new phone and never downloaded it agIn and i use the stock ios app.
The $15 Logitech mouse in the bargain bin at office max lasted me literally 4 years. Any mouse will work, your issue will be configuring those 18 button mmo mice
I’ve used Bluefin and Aurora for some light web development. I created a container with toolbox (I assume things would be similar with distrobox) and did what I needed. When I needed, I could run npm start and it was as if I had developed locally.
The executable that I would be running is cargo (the rust build tool) but I want that inside of a container. I could cargo build inside the container and then execute the output binary on the host but then I lose things like hot-reload.
As long as possible, as long as someone is using it, as long as someone can keep maintaining it.
If the main developer team can no longer maintain it then open-source it, put it in the public domain and set it free. Ditto for firmware and hardware documentation.
Companies oughta be forced to release all information they have on hardware they no longer maintain and disable any vendor-lock crap once warranty ends.
Yes hardware gets old and in the computer realm it usually means it’s rendered obsolete, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its uses.
As most others said, pretty much any distro is fine. You have a powerhouse of a laptop, so running a Windows VM inside of KVM would pose no problem, but if you can, I’d advise to try avoiding a VM.
Teams is basically just a web app masquerading as a classic application using Electron, so you can just use Teams inside of your browser of choice with minimal features missing (the only one I noticed was green-screen, but I didn’t care that much about it).
Even if you use a lot of Office, you’d be surprised at how similar LibreOffice is to MS Office. The UI is a lot worse IMO, but 99% of the features are there. Tables in Word/Writer seem to behave quite a bit differently for one which can get annoying, along with the usual problems of switching from one UI to another. As for formats, LibreOffice supports MS Office extensions. There are some differences in rendering because of what I see as MS bullshit, but it’s limited to padding, font size, etc. (and missing fonts), but if your teachers are open to it you can easily send them the original as well as a PDF reference just in case.
I didn’t use Office web apps for a few years now, but when I did they were missing a lot of features (more than 80% i’d say), but others say the situation has improved, so you can try that in your browser of choice like Teams.
If you need the desktop Office apps, you maybe could use Wine or something to run them on Linux, but I don’t have any experience with that so I don’t know how well they behave or how the setup is.
You could easily run a VM with KVM with the specs you listed. Personally I find the installation of KVM and Windows VM creation a bit convoluted, but there are great tutorials availiable online and it’s a one-time ordeal of maybe 15-45 minutes (including VM creation, depending on how fast you want to go/how familiar with the Linux command line you are), so not that bad. Utilizing virt-manager limits command line use to just the first setup of KVM. Installing the VM can be done graphically using virt-manager.
I don’t know how drawing tablet passthrough compatibility in KVM is (probably great though). RedHat drivers enable shared clipboard and dragging files over between the host and VM, so even that should be quite painless if you choose to go the VM route.
In my experience it Just Works ™️. I spin up a distro/toolbox, compile some software (e.g. Emacs) then run the executable inside the container, and up pops the GUI window.
If you use distrobox, you can even distrobox-export desktop files, at which point a containerised gui application is practically indistinguishable from one installed on the host system
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