request | are you keeping (unsupported) hardware in use by running Plasma?

[Martin Steigerwald]

Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss - 09.12.22, 14:01:48 CET:
> So, if you have a moment, and you would like to help me make of list
> of hardware KDE continues to keep in use, can you send me the
> following?
> 
> - Distro and desktop environment you use,
> - hardware information (RAM, etc.), and
> - bonus points if you know that other operating systems have
> discontinued support for that hardware (and if possible a link).

Don't know how old you mean. I have Devuan Ceres running on ThinkPad 
T520 with Sandybridge CPU/GPU and with 16 GiB RAM. Runs perfectly. Would 
work with less RAM, too. I even played some 3D games on it, even at Full 
HD resolution, but for that use case I would not really recommend it. At 
the moment I don't use this laptop anymore. However I still expect it to 
work nicely.

Then I also have a ThinkPad X260 with 8 GB RAM. Also Devuan Ceres. 
Plasma runs wonderful. However suspend does not work very well. 
Hibernation works, till kernel 5.15, so I still run kernel 5.15. Later 
kernels cannot even power off the laptop anymore. However I am not into 
bisecting it to a bad commit.

All systems are using SSDs.

So far privately I never ever bought a new laptop from a new laptop 
retailer. In Germany it is quite easy to obtain used, often enough 
almost new and sometimes even new ThinkPads for much lower prices. I 
bought two ThinkPad T14 AMD Gen 1 laptops for prices much much lower 
than retail prices. Including the one I am writing this mail from. For 
this one which even had more RAM than what I would normally have bought 
- 32 GiB - I easily saved 800 Euro compared to buying it as new. And it 
did not really make a difference. The laptop looked as if it was new.

Basically I'd say: Any hardware within the last 10 years that Linux 
supports nicely will work nicely with Plasma as well. This topic IMHO is 
much more what hardware Linux runs well on. If Linux and X.org/Wayland 
run well, Plasma will to. I strongly recommend SSDs also for used 
systems. As minimum I'd recommend 4 GiB of RAM. Plasma can go lower than 
that, I think. But if you like to open a few apps its better to have at 
least 4 GiB of RAM I'd say. 16 GiB however is more than many people 
need. Whether Linux still runs well on old hardware can be a hit or miss 
experience at least regarding to some of the functionality. Like newer 
Linux kernels not being able to switch of a ThinkPad X260 and thus you'd 
need to switch off with power button after hibernation image is written. 
I even still have a ThinkPad T42 with Radeon graphics. But that is not 
so much fun anymore, as it started to have gfx driver issues. I think 
its it and miss, cause Linux kernel developers usually do not work on 
(very) old hardware at least when it comes to Intel/AMD X64 platforms. 
So they won't notice when a change in a driver breaks an old system.

Whether any of these are not supported by Microsoft Windows anymore I 
don't know and frankly I don't care, you'd need to research that for 
yourself. I bet that ThinkPad T520 may easily be too old to run Windows 
11. It does have a TPM and UEFI… however I would not be surprised if 
Windows 11 required something in firmware that it does not provide, like 
TPM v2 or whatnot.

Ciao,
-- 
Martin