It’s not actually the “older hardware” that’s responsible for security vulnerabilities, it’s Microsoft chosing to end support for Windows 10.
That “older” hardware capable of running Windows 10 is more than capable of running any Linux distro which will keep on getting security updates for a long while (and you can just upgrade it again if that stops as Linux is nowhere as hardware demanding as Windows, especially the latest, Electron + AI, Windows).
For people who just use their PC for Office software, e-mail and browsing - who are the ones getting entry level PCs - hardware has been more than powerfull enough for 2 decades, and it’s only Windows bloatware having grown to use the available computing power that has forced people to upgrade the hardware.
I’m just thinking the more well known stuff with the “fancier” desktops and shipped with applications like LibreOffice and Firefox which are probably closer to familiar and don’t look like a step back for Windows and Mac users.
If you really want to extend the life of your hardware to the max, well, whilst Linux has discontinued support for 486 and Pentium processors last year, any hardware newer than that (so, around 30 years or less) will still run the latest kernel and as you mentioned there are distros targeting machines with very little RAM and HDD space.
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It’s not actually the “older hardware” that’s responsible for security vulnerabilities, it’s Microsoft chosing to end support for Windows 10.
That “older” hardware capable of running Windows 10 is more than capable of running any Linux distro which will keep on getting security updates for a long while (and you can just upgrade it again if that stops as Linux is nowhere as hardware demanding as Windows, especially the latest, Electron + AI, Windows).
For people who just use their PC for Office software, e-mail and browsing - who are the ones getting entry level PCs - hardware has been more than powerfull enough for 2 decades, and it’s only Windows bloatware having grown to use the available computing power that has forced people to upgrade the hardware.
Also distros aren’t the final step of availability.
There are forks like elks linux runnable with 256Kb RAM.
Oh, yeah.
I’m just thinking the more well known stuff with the “fancier” desktops and shipped with applications like LibreOffice and Firefox which are probably closer to familiar and don’t look like a step back for Windows and Mac users.
If you really want to extend the life of your hardware to the max, well, whilst Linux has discontinued support for 486 and Pentium processors last year, any hardware newer than that (so, around 30 years or less) will still run the latest kernel and as you mentioned there are distros targeting machines with very little RAM and HDD space.
People believe it, I couldn’t even convince my own father. He rather spend 600 bucks for a new laptop, for no reason.
My hope is that the crazy RAM and HDD/SDD prices and hence crazy prices for new PCs will push more people to try Linux.