Fun fact: if you run a newer kernel version on old hardware you will get better performance than running a kernel from when the hardware was released. It pains me when people run some old version of Debian on a 25 year old laptop. It is best to run something current.
It depends. On older devices there isn’t much testing of newer versions of the kernel so they can be more broken than older version.
Case in point, recently on an old laptop (~12 years) I noticed video performance was really bad which I later found out was due to modern distros defaulting to the iHD intel graphics driver. But iHD is only supported from 5th gen (Broadwell) onward. So, on older devices anything depending on the graphics driver for hardware acceleration (like video decode) fails and falls back to software rendering.
and feels like it got better recently. when i used kernel 6.2 on my (high end) hardware, everything froze when copying a large amount of files. on 6.8 there’s just a bit of delay. still not as good as I’d like, but maybe some day.
Haven’t Debian and most other distros stopped supporting “i386” for quite a while now? I remember reading something like that, but they still have 32-bit isos up.
IIRC a bunch of distros moved to i586 or i686 as their minimum CPU version, which means packages get compiled with instructions that aren’t supported by 386 and 486 CPUs. So those 32-bit ISOs only work on relatively recent 32-bit chips and will crash on chips which are 30+ years old.
Fun fact: if you run a newer kernel version on old hardware you will get better performance than running a kernel from when the hardware was released. It pains me when people run some old version of Debian on a 25 year old laptop. It is best to run something current.
It depends. On older devices there isn’t much testing of newer versions of the kernel so they can be more broken than older version.
Case in point, recently on an old laptop (~12 years) I noticed video performance was really bad which I later found out was due to modern distros defaulting to the
iHDintel graphics driver. ButiHDis only supported from 5th gen (Broadwell) onward. So, on older devices anything depending on the graphics driver for hardware acceleration (like video decode) fails and falls back to software rendering.The kernel scheduler is much better in newer versions
and feels like it got better recently. when i used kernel 6.2 on my (high end) hardware, everything froze when copying a large amount of files. on 6.8 there’s just a bit of delay. still not as good as I’d like, but maybe some day.
Haven’t Debian and most other distros stopped supporting “i386” for quite a while now? I remember reading something like that, but they still have 32-bit isos up.
IIRC a bunch of distros moved to i586 or i686 as their minimum CPU version, which means packages get compiled with instructions that aren’t supported by 386 and 486 CPUs. So those 32-bit ISOs only work on relatively recent 32-bit chips and will crash on chips which are 30+ years old.