I have been thinking my next computer should be a linux box of some sort. For those people who are running linux: do you ever run into this sort of problem, where the hardware you have is unable to run updates to the operating system? Do you ever run into updates to programs that will no longer work on your system?
Nope. Linux was originally designed to run on a 12 MHz i386DX, and the current version still does (though most modern distros with a GUI require a little bit more than that, typically a Pentium II with 128 MB of RAM). Pretty much every device that was ever supported in Linux is either still supported or has an old driver available that still works. One of the (many) reasons I use Linux is that I actually have some old hardware that is no longer supported by other operating systems.As for program updates requiring a newer version of the OS, that does sometimes happen, though it isn't a problem to keep the OS up to date, even on old hardware.
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