My opinion on Ubuntu cancelling Intel 80386/80386-clone processor support

[John Moser]

On Tue, 2016-09-06 at 21:33 -0400, JMZ wrote:
> Hi Ryan,
> 
> When you say "Ubuntu 16.10" I wonder if you mean that you are
> running 
> gnome with the unity shell or just the command line only. Running any
> of 
> the graphical enviroments (save maybe lxde) on a 80586 would be
> pretty 
> exceptional.
> 
> 

> Pentium 4/4 HT systems (which are still 80586 chipset basically) can
> be 
> got even at community trash dumps.  If you're starting a school,
> setting 
> up donated Pentium 4's and old dual-cores with Lubuntu or another
> lxde 
> distro might be your best bet.  This is especially true if all
> you're 
> running is Firefox and LibreOffice, or similar.
> 

Is this even worth the resources?  There are multiple issues here, most
obvious being the distinction between a current-generation operating
system (Ubuntu) and a special-purpose software project (to target
legacy hardware).  Is legacy 32-bit support part of Ubuntu's mission,
or are resources best diverted to improving the system for the other
99.99% of use cases?  Like it or not, i586 is probably less than one in
ten thousand installations.


E-waste reuse is itself an economics issue.  We like to think we can
donate those systems to some poor people somewhere; but that has a huge
array of complexities:

* Humans have to eat, among other things, and so their labor time is at
  a premium:  you trade the labor time to produce one good for the
  labor time to produce another, e.g. food, and thus any volunteered
  time is a real cost paid by the volunteer;

* Collecting, sorting, and shipping those things takes human labor; 

* The logistics takes an immense amount of labor:  who gets these
  computers, what are their requirements, how do we optimize the
  benefit for their particular poverty case, and so forth;

* The targets of e-waste reuse are frequently poor nations with
  unreliable or expensive access to electricity and even waste
  disposal

E-waste reuse can actually cost as much or more than new production,
and has runtime costs because it's less-efficient to use, maintain, and
even power.  Collecting, inventorying, and preparing e-waste as a
refurbished good incurs more labor per unit than rolling new units off
an assembly line; the cost advantage depends on if the components cost
more than the additional labor.  Even then, there's a lot of cost in
developing the logistics of using something out-of-date in a modern
environment.

Even if you can co-opt slave labor into the deal, is supporting this
kind of specialized use costly for the Ubuntu maintainers?  Just
running a build of the OS as 32-bit is inadequate; with the broad range
of out-of-date hardware left behind by modern system software, you'd
need to respond to ad-hoc support issues with varied hardware
configurations breaking because all hardware configurations used in
that context are uncommon by nature.  That in an of itself seems to
warrant a project specially dedicated to e-waste reuse programs, rather
than a best-effort and costly nod to the concept of older systems.