On Mon, 19 Oct 2020 at 02:15, Subsentient <thinkingrodent@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I figure I'll add my two cents for as little as that's worth.
Personally, I use extlinux with a custom, barebones configuration. On my EFI systems, I use syslinux EFI. I like the simplicity of syntax for syslinux's configuration and how small it is, but that's me, and it's not going to be everyone's preference.
I also own several legacy BIOS based systems that cannot support EFI, and they work fine, including my daily driver Thinkpad T410.
While I know it will still be possible for *very* advanced Linux users such as me to get Fedora working on BIOS systems with my own bootloader of choice even if Fedora drops support, it would create a maintenance nuisance if I need to boot a recovery ISO etc or reinstall Fedora from scratch, e.g. in drive failure. And, of course, most Fedora users can't easily swap out a bootloader, they just haven't spent the energy learning those parts of the OS.
Though, that would hardly be my concern. As sad as I was to see i686 support dropped, I could at least understand the reasoning behind it, given how few people used it and how large of a maintenance task it was. I myself didn't really use any systems that needed it. This, however, is different.
Personally, I despise GRUB2, that's why I switched to syslinux when distros dropped GRUB1. I find GRUB2 very bloated, needlessly complicated, with too many magic black boxes.
That said, dropping BIOS support simply to adopt another bootloader in its place is a deeply disturbing proposition. There are many BIOS based systems still in service, and there will be for quite some time.
My Thinkpad was manufactured in 2011 and still only supports BIOS. In 2012, I started seeing EFI-based PCs on the market due to Windows 8 and MSFT's push for secure boot. Apple was an exception, they started using EFI as soon as they switched to Intel. The rest of the world remained on BIOS until 2012.
Are you seriously considering dropping support for all systems older than 8 years of age? Even if I could mostly work around such a decision, it would anger me and I imagine a great many other users, purely on ideological grounds. I would consider switching distributions, and I've been a Fedora loyalist since 2009.
Do you remember when Linux was touted as a lightweight alternative for older PCs, and you could install flagship distros on grandma's PC to breathe new life into it? I do. I don't want to live in the timeline where the only distros that run on such things are puppy linux and similar.
I think the issue is that people have rose coloured glasses about how much 'life' we could get out of someone's older PC... and how old that desktop was. In the 30 years I have worked in PC/Unix, I would say that before 2004, it was rare that it breathed new life into 2+ year old technology as much as that the Linux kernel worked with all the hardware by then. Working on an 1985 i386 in 1993 with Linux was great, but it was not any faster than Windows 3.11 for a lot of things. A i486 with Linux was not running as 'fast' as a i586 with Windows 95 in 1997. You could get some better usage from older hardware as long as you kept the tasks run meant to run in such a 'limited' environment. But as soon as Grandpa wanted to open Netscape or Staroffice.. you would watch a mouse crawl as you ran out of swap.
Having upgraded lots of "Grand-pa's" computer for 2 decades, I can say that their computers were rarely older than 4-5 years old until after 2008. It is only after Moore's law 'broke' after 2003 stopped seeing doubling cpu speeds every 18 months that trying to keep hardware useful longer than 5 years has been possible. When clock speeds were no longer doubling and 'standard' hardware memory bought came in a window of 2GB to 4 GB for a decade, being able to keep hardware longer really started happening. At that point, most of the time there was no giant performance boost for most things people did on the computer and unless you were into gaming, or professions using a CPU to its max... most people stuck with the old stuff.
The issue is that while 'moore's' law was no longer doubling every 18months it was still working and tasks had to be rewritten to work with more cores/threads/etc. As that happened the software's need for more CPU power has increased to the point were a 10+ year computer isn't very useful for 'modern' software (browser and various applications). Instead if you want to have something work on a 2012 system well.. just use software from 2012. It is still available. Sure you can install Linux on that 15 year old computer but if you have to tell the user well you can't actually use a browser, an editor or half the things you can do on your cheapest smart-phone.. what use is that computer?
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Stephen J Smoogen.
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