I've recently seen a trend in tech communities on lemmy where people have developed this mentality that computer hardware is as disposable as a compostable cup, and that after 10-15 years you should just chuck it in the bin and get something new. If someone asks for tech support, they'll just be told to buy new hardware. If someone is saddened their hardware is no longer supported by software they are just entitled, need to pull up their bootstraps, and "only" spend $100 to get something used that will also not be supported in 5 years. It doesn't matter if there is actual information out there that'll help them either. If the hardware is old, people will unanimously decide that nothing can be done.
I've seen this even in linux communities, what happened to people giving a damn about e-waste? Why is the solution always to just throw money at the problem? It's infuriating. I've half a mind to just block every tech/software community other than the ones on hexbear at this point.
Older Hardware can be pretty decent if you know what you're doing. However, many projects (even FOSS that are more hobbyist) are making decisions that make their software harder to use on older hardware. For example, everyone's desire to switch to zstd is terrible for people on older hardware, since it was designed around more recent CPUs. It's noticeably slower for little gain on older hardware, yet they love to parrot the "That's just how progress goes"-line while shoving highly curated benchmarks into people's faces to "prove" that
$LATEST_THINGfrom silicon valley is "superior".Arch Linux used to be really snappy on all of my Hardware out of the box before they went all in on zstd. Now I have to go out of my way and put in a bunch of work just to get back at least most of that performance.