Legacy x86 is a short-term solution and not economical one as older Intels (Pentium D era, specifically) tend to chew up a lot of power. Early AM3 (~2009) may be the way, but only for basic tasks (I happen to operate one Athlon II X250 machine, which is grandparents' computer). But still, legacy x86 has non-free microcode and, in case of AMD, non-free graphics firmware
And well, there's one more problem with older x86 (and especially with LGA 775 and AM2 ones): They all are reaching literal end-of-life. From every LGA 775 (Pentium D, Core duo, etc.) board I've had - none survived. The last being Asus P5N-D which died just recently
The most durable x86s I've stumbled upon are Compaq d510 SFFs, which are at least 21-year old (!) chariots. And yet, these are IA-32, so it's a dead end as well.
POWER9-based from RCS are way too expensive, especially for east-european like me (5600$ for 4-core desktop with Broadcom NICs doesn't sound convincing)
ARM ain't a solution as well, it's a proprietary architecture encumbered with mentioned TrustZone - It's like switching from Intel ME to AMD PSP or vice-versa
RISC-V, though it's market hasn't yet matured, seems to be way to go, especially with mentioned SciFive or MilkV - Way cheaper and some boards look already superior from x86 (i.e. MilkV Pioneer with it's 2GHz 64-core processor)
Currently won't buy anything as I have no funds for that (and my newest PC is barely month-old), but I think I'm safe to decide that my current daily driver is the last x86 ever bought by me
Uptorn wrote:Ubuntu, Redhat and OpenSuse have already openly discussed building packages for x86_64v2/v3 while maintaining "pathways" for users on "legacy" hardware. The problem is that software compiled for v2+ fundamentally cannot be run on v1. It is not backward compatible.
I believe that Debian won't drop x86_64v1 any soon. And even if it does, we still have *BSD as a last resort
pizza-rat wrote: Does anybody know of a good website/resource for keeping up with this stuff in a sane way? I don't use social media.
I don't know any, sadly. I don't use social media as well, and free alternatives don't look promising or free-speech-respecting either
I just scan a lot of forums (especially this forum and FreeBSD's), sometimes mailing lists, and if I find anything I verify it by searching for information on it
And well, sometimes I get to know about something because while browsing that "least evil" non-free marketplace platform of my country, since sellers tend to advertise non-free pseudo-functions as a "features"
pizza-rat wrote: Maybe I'm just in the dark here, but I get the sense that the "privacy community" or whatever you'd like to call it is quite scattered and has a constant influx of both new topics and new users asking about the same old topics that have already been answered before (because a lot of these communities are on modern disposable social media platforms rather than on something better structured like a real forum).
True, we need a real forum for that. Maybe it's time to create such?