I think Linus is probably being pressured by the corporate lobby that funds his org. And I think with the bubble inflating out of control, the tech bros are desperate to push AI really hard down everyone’s throats.

People can just make the old hardware alive by using an older Linux version. Why the fork is even needed?

Sir, I think you are overreacting. Nobody is running a 7+ Linux Kernel on a 486 machine. Even if you have microcontrollers with a 486 instruction set, I am pretty sure they already fixed the timestamp issue, or they don’t need Linux at all since it’s an embedded application.

Hey sir, supermarket owners in 3rd world countries use newer stuff, no need to shit on us as if we were still living in the stone age.

Only George RR Martin in his little old Wordstar word processor would run on a 486 computer with DOS. And I doubt he is a Linux user, or if he is making updates to make his Kernel up-to-date with the current releases.

Is ReactOS still alive?

What distro did you use? Don’t tell me you used Arch Linux… That’s not beginner friendly at all.

I’d advise you to use Mint or Ubuntu (preferably the first). When I have NVidia drivers I usually used one that is install through “additional drivers” app, because those are the ones which were tested for your distro. But if you have a really new GPU, there might be an issue because devs weren’t able to update the drivers and test them.

It’s not a simple matter of choice. Most people aren’t invested into open source, they just want to get by and do their mundane things. Most people aren’t even aware of all the privacy stuff or abusive practices of big business, it’s usually some more outspoken tech savvy person that decides to expose what the big corps are doing. So using open source is not a choice, like you would be just choosing your preferred cereal brand, but both a technical and political act. And most people are just into the system, they aren’t aware of all malicious things around them.

Not only that, but also when companies feel threatened, they start imposing new technical and legal restrictions to make using OSS harder. Since they have more control over the whole production supply chain of devices, they have more cost effective options and even partnership with hardware vendors to make using OSS very hard or impossible.