this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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the fact that it's open and you can get old versions of the kernel. i say we are very lucky we get the support we get but ask long as that older version is still available abd opening means no e waste. even 386s
I kinda disagree. If you need something to connect to the internet, it needs to be rather up to date.
for real work yeah but for getting to experience retro hardware https://protoweb.org/ works great. by no means am I advocating for any production data be used on these machines. but at the same time the code open if you want it bad enough. you do it yourself or pay a bounty to have some others do it. if you really want to use it for real work. like I said it's great you don't have to start from scratch the old version archive is there warts and all.
Or use a browser that's so featureless that exploits don't have anything to exploit, such as Lynx. The rest should be handled by any decent firewall in front of it.
If there are no security updates, it does become ewaste because of severe vulnerability to all sorts of attacks that makes it unsuitable for most use cases. Though it's still better than nothing.
It is not that simple.
For hardware attacks, older hardware are probably safe since the attacks are specifics to some newer features. I really doubt you can deliver a Spectre attack on anything up until the Pentium or even later.
On the software side, there could be some security bugs to which some older version could be vulnerable since there were not the vulnerable code at the time. Granted, there could be some security bugs that were not yet discovered in older codebase.