What to use for browser flash support?

[Liam Proven]

On 20 January 2018 at 20:45, Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:
>
> This is doubleplusungood. There are *millions* of working 32-bit computers
> which could be used with a 32-bit distribution, and neglecting them is A
> Very Bad Idea.
>
> As the large corporations and governments continue to move to locking out
> non-Microsoft, non-Apple, etc software, we are approaching the day when an
> unapproved general-purpose computer will not be able to install an operating
> system or connect to the network.
>
> If you have old computers which can still run 32-bit (or even 64-bit)
> systems, KEEP THEM. Do not throw them out — one day they will be the only
> free computers left.

I would suggest that with things like CoreBoot, there are plenty of
far more modern, more capable things that can be 100% FOSS.

There are many other issues, though.

32-bit x86 can't usefully address >3.25 GiB of RAM. There must have
been man-years wasted troubleshooting that. Modern OSes need more than
that.

And they are old, with spinning hard disks. They are growing
unreliable and they use far more power than a modern machine, because
Koomey's Law has supplanted Moore's Law for a decade now.

Especially for the terrible Pentium 4 Netburst architecture. Those
machines were fan-heaters. The early ones used RAMbus memory, so can't
be upgraded, and the mid-period ones had a bolted-on crippled memory
controller, because Intel drank RAMbus Inc's Kool-Aid.

No, mid to late period 32-bit PCs were a bad thing, mostly, and are
better avoided.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053