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> To be fair, "old hardware" is kind of frozen in time by definition. No, not at all. It's a continuously-moving baseline, because it's relative to now. And where "old" begins is a judgement call. So, for instance, one useful definition is "not capable of usefully running a contemporary OS." Since all current mainstream Linuxes (Ubuntu, Fedora, even Arch, etc.) are 64-bit that implies a 32-bit machine. One with a reasonable amount of RAM for the time, a gigabyte or two say, but which can't be upgraded. Intel Atom chips were mostly 32-bit until a decade and a bit ago. Core Solo was quite quick but 32-bit only. Some early 64-bit chips have 32-bit firmware and so can't run a 32-bit OS. So there is a moving baseline of machines that can't take >=4GB RAM, can only boot a 32-bit OS, maybe have 1 CPU core, but were made in the 1st decade of this century and remain fully-functional, with wifi etc. DSL isn't very useful on such kit, and if it works, it's insecure. So, no, it's not frozen in time, and no, a never-updated 20YO snapshot isn't very useful. |