shasheene

I'm still sad that Linux dropped support for i486 and early-i586 CPUs.

And more disappointed that distributions especially Debian the "universal operating system" has dropped support for i586 already (and is dropping support for i686)

Open-source doesn't have the same pressures of commercial software from Apple or Microsoft. I really love the idea of obsessive, perfectionism approach of providing indefinite hardware support to obscure old hardware (but especially once-popular old hardware), with adequate automated testing suites to test ancient hardware.

Maybe with agentic AI coding we'll be able to expand support windows, and even bring back hardware support for older hardware.

> the project lead, Rudra B. Rudra, has had less time to dedicate to the work recently. As a result, the team could not ship a stable 25.10 release this October.

That may not be the biggest deal, because Ubuntu 25.10 itself is not going to be stable, thanks to switching from GNU coreutils to the uutils Rust rewrite, with Ubuntu 25.10 being a "see what breaks and fix it" canary before the long-term support 26.04 release in 6 months.

I think this is premature and a big mistake for Linux.

The costs of distros and the kernel steadily dropping older x86 support over the last few years never causes an outcry but it's an erosion of what made Linux great. Especially for non-English speaking people in less developed countries.

Open-source maintenance is not a obligation, but it's sad there is not more people pushing to maintain support. Especially for the "universal operating system" Debian which was previously a gold standard in architecture support.

I maintain a relatively popular live Linux distro based on Ubuntu and due to user demand will look into a NetBSD variant to continue support (as suggested in this thread), potentially to support legacy 586 and 686 too.

Though a Debian 13 "Trixie" variant with a custom compiled 686 kernel will be much easier than switching to NetBSD, it appears like NetBSD has more commitment to longer-term arch support.

It would be wonderful to develop systems (eg emulation) to make it practical to support architectures as close to indefinitely as possible.

It does feel like a big end of an era moment for Linux and distros here, with the project following the kind of decision making of big tech companies rather than the ideals of computer enthusiasts.

Right now these deprecation decisions will directly make me spend time working at layers of abstraction I wasn't intending to in order to mitigate the upstream deprecations of the kernels and distros. The reason I have used the kernel and distros like Debian has been to offload that work to the specialist maintainers of the open-source community.

Gaol is an archaic spelling of jail, that retains the same pronunciation and meaning as jail :)

Oh finally! I have a Kindle Scribe, and it's really amazing hardware, but it's unusable for reading websites like Wikipedia and sending links to it using the Amazon bookmarklet is a pretty bad experience.

The biggest issue is the web browser doesn't have pagination, ie a next page button. *It only supports smooth scrolling using the touch screen*. Which on an e-ink display is a completely awful, insanely frustrating experience that I can't believe they ship it (and the Scribe is an 11th generation product).

Using a web browser to read pure text is a blurred mess that's takes several painful seconds to slowly scroll to the next page.

Since I bought the Kindle Scribe (big mistake due to the above issue), I've wanted to jailbreak it to install a non-terrible Wikipedia browser.

Eg the one available in the KOReader project -- the open-source alternative eink-optimized ebook app that is widely-supported across the eink ecosystem (including older Kindles).

Thanks for heads up that a jailbreak is finally available!

Yes, Patreon's WYSIWYG editor is incredibly buggy.

But far worse is Patreon's messaging platform. Write a long message, then accidentally have a window resize event occur and lose your entire message.

Patreon's problem with losing text has burned me more times than other products with similar issues (like creating a Jira issue).

Some platforms like Slack do a much better job of saving a draft.

I'd argue Joe Manchin (Democratic Senator of West Virginia) has single-handedly changed an eye-watering $3.5 trillion dollar spending bill into what appears to be a slightly less eye-watering $1.5 trillion package. The lower number (and thus lower taxes) makes it much more acceptable to a broader fraction of US society. Assuming the bill passes, it's an example of compromise working (but within negotiations of a single party).

The key thing is if one party wants to be able to pass the larger number without that pivotal vote, they need to appeal to a greater fraction of society and win more seats so they don't require that particular vote.

Two houses helps prevent tyranny of the majority. Consider the United States. Each state gets 2 senators no matter what, but the proportion of House of Representatives seats each state gets is calculated based on the state's population.

This quirk means that even small states like Wyoming have equal Senate representation as the populous states like California, Texas or New York.

This arguably undemocratic over-representation gives the smaller states much more power in certain areas, but this is by design. It provides incentive to keep large rural states part of a single nation. Compromises like that makes a country as a whole stronger.

Another interesting aspect is US Senate terms are long (6 years), with a third of members up for reelection happening every TWO years. Compared to the House of Representatives which has 4 year terms, and half up for reelection every 2 years. The net effect is it requires several election cycles to have a big impact on the passage of laws. This contributes to stability.

What new features and improvements would you like to see added to Rescuezilla?