Out of Space

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 2016-08-10 at 00:00 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> The way computers, whiteware, entertainment gear is wasted nowadays
> can't continue that much longer. The reason that "rare earth elements"
> are named _rare_ earth elements, is that they are _rare_. One
> day they need to be completely recycled and part of a recycling process
> is repairing and keeping old hardware as well as writing software for
> "old" hardware. Consuming the way a minority of humans, those from the
> rich countries, is doing it now, could only continue a few decades, if
> at all. If you don't have children and assuming you only care about
> yourself, you could continue, if not, consider to think over this
> attitude. 

Here you are saying people should not buy new systems just because they
want "the new hotness", but rather stick with systems they have that
are sufficient to their needs.  I have no argument with that.  As I
said my CPU is 8 years old and I have no particular plans to upgrade
it, and I do software development for a living and do a lot of
compiling (of complex C++ code, which needs a lot of CPU).

But earlier you said that developers and distributions shouldn't be
relying on "the latest and greatest" hardware, giving SSE3 as an
example.  I take exception to the idea that SSE3 should be considered
"latest and greatest".

SSE3 is a squarely mainstream technology and it's completely reasonable
to expect it to be present on a normal system today.  Anyone running a
system which doesn't have SSE3 is out of the mainstream and presumably
knows it, and should be using an appropriate Linux distribution to
support it.

My older system has no problem running modern distros and desktop
environments (anyway, GNOME3 which is what I use; not sure about
Unity/KDE/etc.)  I disagree with the accusation that Linux distros and
developers don't care about anything but the latest and greatest
hardware and won't run on anything less; IMO that's neither fair nor
accurate.

But that's all I have to say about this topic; I don't think this is
the right forum to discuss the problems of first-world excesses.

Cheers!