So here’s a fun development: OpenSUSE Leap 16 has decided my perfectly functional 64-bit CPU is now vintage hardware. Not broken. Not slow. Just…old enough that they can’t be bothered.
And before you suggest I just switch distros—it’s not just openSUSE. Fedora dropped support, so all of Red Hat’s offerings are out. Arch requires newer instruction sets. Ubuntu’s headed the same direction. The dominoes are falling across the entire ecosystem, and apparently we’ve all agreed that CPUs from the early 2010s are now archaeological artifacts.
The kicker? Tumbleweed—their rolling release that is far less stable—still supports my processor just fine. Apparently my CPU is stable enough for their hobbyist branch but too rickety for their “enterprise-ready” release. Make it make sense.
But wait, it gets better. This is happening at the exact moment the Linux community is—rightfully—dunking on Microsoft for Windows 11’s arbitrary hardware requirements. “Don’t throw away a perfectly good computer!” we’ve been shouting from the rooftops. “Linux will run on anything! Sustainability! Right to repair! Stick it to Big Tech!”
Turns out we meant “Linux will run on anything…until it won’t. Also, have you considered our unstable rolling release?”
So I’m back on Debian, where apparently the radical notion of “if it works, don’t break it” still holds some currency. At least they have the decency to support hardware until it literally catches fire, and maybe even for a release cycle after that.
The moral of the story? I don’t know. Maybe that hypocrisy is cross-platform, or that my next computer build should factor in which distro maintainers are going to ghost my CPU in 2028.
Welcome back to Debian Stable, where boring is a feature, not a bug.
If you mean “far less stable”=“changes often”, yes, that is in the nature of a rolling release.
If you mean “breaks often” that might not be the case for Tumbleweed.
I (and many others here) have been running Tumbleweed on personal machines without show-stoppers for years, but I admit that a bit of discipline is needed in upgrades.
If you need “enterprise grade” to deploy 1000s systems, well, Debian is a sensible choice.
Leap 16 is meant to be supported through 2032 and a system built in 2012 might well have caught fire by then, as you say
Tumbleweed might switch as well sooner or later, it is just not meant to be supported to that end.
My oldest computer was bought in 2010. And it is using v2, so should support Leap 16. I have not yet tried installing.
Yes, it is slow. It supports only USB2 and I think it supports only SATA2. So I won’t shed any tears when I have to junk it. But it still seems to be supported by Leap 16.
Well spoken, LanceHaverkamp! This is abandoning the good ‘Linux will run on anything!’ cry. I do not know whether technically this abandoning old CPU was necessary, but if this CPU runs under Tumbleweed, why can they not make Leap supporting it too? I wonder whether my Intel Core i5-3570k will work. Can anybody tell me whether it has x86-64-v2?
Thank you, X86-64 microarchitecture levels - openSUSE Wiki is a very good instruction for discovering whether one’s CPU has x86-64-v2. I discovered that my Intel Core i5-3570k does have it.
Why I will be converting 90 Leap 15.6 sites worldwide to Debian as well. They all are being used my retired folks that hated what Microsoft did to Windows after XP. The Gnome 2 and then MATE could be made to look like Windows XP, so that is what I helped dozens of former co-workers move to Linux (Centos, then OpenSUSE).
The reason it was easy to take Windows Vista, 8, 10 and 11 to OpenSUSE, was wine ran most of the old XP apps perfectly fine.
Leap 16 only supports 64 bit wine, so 99% of what old Windows users no longer work.
OpenSUSE says install wine flatpak. I did - 1st you have to turn on 32 bit in the kernel or the wine flatpak will not execute. (the one reason that they say no 32bit wine support - it is really no 32 bit development in SLES 16 so none in OpenSUSE.)
The flatpak wine runs but cannot see any files outside of it’s windows C: drive. making it worthless to see years of files located in the Linux files system and on NAS drives.
I was not aware of such a feature for flatpaks.
I installed it and now have full access to my drives.
We need to document how to do this. I am going to try to do a step by step on how to do 32 bit wine on Fedora 16.0.
Now waiting for VirtualBox and Packman are the only reasons not to move forward. Some of those I support run Windows 11 for one or two apps that cannot be run in wine.
I will NOT be migrating off OpenSUSE Leap due to the lack of 32bit wine, although you have to enable 32bit in the kernel for the flatpak wine to run.
Thank you for your insight on how to get around the issue. I actually did not find any references to it in my Google searches on how to fix it. I did find where the new Drive_C is at and I figured out how to make all the desktop shortcuts work with the flatpak wine without having to modify all of them - a small script to replace /usr/bin/wine to point to the flatpak wine fixed that.
Have been waiting with the hdd2ssd swap until Leap16 and now it isn’t compatible with my A6 6310 secondary notebook. Rolling release or running two different distros seems to be a lot of unnecessary hassle.
My home office desktop is a pre-Ryzen AMD APU A10-7800
My cheap/durable plastic go-anywhere laptop is an Intel Celeron N3060
They’re both working, office desktops (KDE Plasma) that need to be running (not updating) whenever a client calls. The desktop has many years of client data. The laptop needs to be a low-maintenance, “it just works” laptop, when I’m traveling to clients.
So neither is a prospect for the higher-maintenance and frequent updates of a rolling distro. And, while a LAMP stack can run on a Leap server for many years, desktop apps need more recent versions—so keeping Leap 15.6 & KDE-5 past end-of-life isn’t realistic either.
Hi!
I’m not ready to give up on openSUSE yet after more then 20-years. 16.0 Leaves a lot to wishing for compared to 15.6. The lack of Yast2… I have overcome 32-bit support on old printer with deprecated drivers. Do partition choices in the installer Agama(dig deep). Some hands on and “borrow” rpm’s from Thumbleweed.
I will change my AMD Athlon X4 to a AMD A-3850 on my home-lab server in the basement. Non of them will (can) run Leap16.0 and have no direct contact with I-net. It will still take time before I upgrade my daily desktop to 16.0.
Fronting is a Promox(debian) with pfsense (freebsd) for my IP-dresses (domains) to internet.
