7.0 is apparently going to be the last major kernel version with 486 support. For my Linux on 486 project, I naturally already [stranged 7.0.0 with 16MHz 486SX and 7MB RAM](https://i.imgur.com/MvtG8HZ.png)! Perhaps the last time I can do this to a new major kernel version...
If you don't need the modern Internet, I'm sure it's still perfectly possible to do word processing, spreadsheets, email, and retro gaming on a 486 with the appropriate software. Could probably even find a service that will proxy websites into simple clickable imagemaps and serve 240p YouTube videos in a format playable by an old machine.
I have never had this happen in Arch, but unironically I have never successfully done a dist-upgrade of Ubuntu without bricking the system.
Tbh there are very few upgrades in Arch that require manual intervention and they are always posted on the website. Usually it's just "uninstall one package and install a different one".
If there are clear cut instructions like this, pacman could probably do it on the behalf of the user
I use Arch, but the willingness of the Arch devs to break the system is kind of weird
we've done dist-upgrade on servers at work (some of our older infrastructure doesn't have comprehensive ansible describing it, we're working on it) and it's always gone fine
My _home_ server, however, has always gone wrong, because it's running a kitchen-sink assortment of random crap. And friends with Linux laptops have had it go wrong, because of graphics or WiFi drivers, mostly
Eh I do see probably a couple issues a year where a bug happens due to insufficient testing and a bad commit makes it to the main repos mostly Nvidia and waykand though.
It does actually happen, and the reason is that Arch doesn't have nice point releases like Debian or Fedora does.
If you want to go from Fedora 22 to 43, they tell you not to skip more than one version per upgrade cycle.
You know, do 22 to 24, then 24 to 26, 26 to 28 and so on. If you try to do 22 straight to 43, a bunch of migrations are gonna get skipped, and things are going to break.
Now, if you're 6 months behind on Arch, there's no intermediate versions between the state you're in and the state the current releases are in. You're effectively jumping straight from 22 to 43, and you're likely to have a bunch of migrations skipped.
Arch doesn't have migrations. Things that Fedora would handle with some script to change the config are handled in Arch by making a new version of the config and letting the user handle it. So waiting two days or two years wouldn't matter.
Arch is a rolling release distro. I've never used Arch, but I have used Gentoo, which is one of the OG rolling release distros.
I've been using Gentoo for 20-something years at this point. It used to be true that sometimes when you did an upgrade something would randomly break. So if you updated every few days, you'd have an instance once every month or so where you'd break something, and then you'd have to figure out how to fix it.
Well if you went 8 months without updating, now your update has broken 8 things simultaneously. You might make a change that would fix one problem, but since the system was still broken, you wouldn't know that you've actually fixed anything. So the advice when you went months without updating was often to just re-install because it was easier to re-install than it would be to fix it.
One time I pulled a system out of a closet I hadn't used in 3 years and committed myself to fixing it. It wasn't because it was a useful use of my time, it was because I was bored. I did get it up and running eventually. I don't think I actually used it for anything...I just wanted to fix it.
That was a long time ago. These days, Gentoo is a lot less ~~fun~~ prone to breaking. You can go a year without updating and you're fine. The memes remain though, because real life is temporary and memes are eternal.
Real talk, leaving systems un-updated for _very_ long periods of time can run the risk of accumulated breaking changes resulting in various levels of non-functionality after doing a full upgrade that will require significant manual intervention.
The joke is that Arch supposedly moves so bleedingly fast that in just three months your system will break from all the bleeding edge updates you missed in the intervening weeks and days.
Via wikipedia:
> In 1988, Y-E Data introduced a drive for 2.88 MB Double-Sided Extended-Density (DSED) diskettes which was used by IBM in its top-of-the-line PS/2 and some RS/6000 models and in the second-generation NeXTcube and NeXTstation; however, this format had limited market success due to lack of standards and movement to 1.44 MB drives.
This is interesting, because I was only aware of experimental hacks to cram a bit more than usual onto a floppy. Neato.
You could fool a PS/2 2.88MB drive into using a 1.44MB floppy as a 2.88MB, similar to the way people did with Double Density 5.25" floppies.
I miss the Mac 800KB formatted floppies that used a variable speed drive to pack more data on them. Totally unreadable on PCs.
> EIDE, multiple-IDE controllers, and ATA-CD-ROM support.
I started on Slackware 2.1 with kernel 1.1.59
I had this "new" IDE CD-ROM drive that was not supported so I installed from about 8 floppy disks going back and forth to a college computer lab about 5 times.
After this update the new distributions supported my CD-ROM drive so I would order the Infomagic 6 CD sets with various distributions and software.
What a time to be alive. I remember that ordering the CDs and getting them in the mail "7-10 days later" was faster than downloading it!
Honestly, I kinda miss it a little.
Yeah, I would order CDs until I graduated in May 1997 and started my first job. We had a T-1 line and a CD burner.
Back in 1995 at my internship and then at my job in 1997 we snuck Linux in and started using it without telling anyone. Then when the older engineers saw it they all wanted a Linux machine too. We got a ton of old 486's out of storage and started installing Linux for people to take home.
If you are downloading from [kernel.org](http://kernel.org) that is what you would be doing anyway..
And there is the option to just use git pull to avoid waiting for mirrors to catch up with tarballs.
What does he mean by this?
>I suspect it's a lot of AI tool use that will keep finding corner cases for us for a while, so this may be the "new normal" at least for a while. Only time will tell.
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