Hi Everyone. Did you hear the news of Ubuntu, ‘Thinking’ of removing non-PAE supported kernel flavor? If not, here is the complete story. There was this mail from Tim Gardner, stating about the proposal of “dropping i386 non-PAE supported kernel flavour” which was discussed in the UDS. If this gets implemented, then Ubuntu will not be supporting some Older PCs and people who loves *Buntu flavours for the light weight and machine compatibility will leave the community and will jump over the supporting OS.
I will state the mail sent by him, which you can also look and follow the thread in this link.
As stated,
“Those CPUs that do not have i686 and PAE support will be orphaned.”
I am not sure why this proposal came. Either it might be to reduce the support we provide for these flavours and machines.
“To the best of my knowledge, these include Intel CPUs prior to Pentium II, 400Mhz Pentium M, VIA C3, and Geode LX. As far as I know, there are no laptop or desktop class CPUs being produced that do not meet these minimum requirements.”
I know people who use a machine of my age and still happy with it.
“Before I do something that is difficult to revert, I would like to hear from the development community why we should continue to maintain a kernel flavour that is (in my opinion) getting increasingly low utilization.”
If you ask me, the reason is that there still is utilization of this kernel flavour. I would suggest to not to see the numbers using this flavour, but see the way the Ubuntu makes them feel happy even with their old machine.
“It is my feeling that an extremely high percentage of users of the non-PAE kernel have a CPU that is PAE capable.”
Yeah, I do accept with that. But no one will ever come forward to throw off their first machine, which made them happy. And having Ubuntu in helping them happy, we have a +1 on our court.
What will happen if we do this?
I think you never thought about this. But let me explain the other way around. As stated by you, “there is a high percentage of users of the non-PAE kernel who has a CPU that is PAE capable”. So, if we remove support for the non-PAE kernels, they will go for another OS. It will not happen just in the older machine, but you can expect it to happen in their other machines too(which supports PAE).
I know people who use the same OS in many machines and shift the OS in all of their working machines to maintain the same pattern they observe.
Will this affect the community?
From my view, yes. If we bring this, there will be a lots of people shifting both of their machines. Also, we are here to satisfy people when they sit before the machine. Atleast we can support them in some LTS release so that they wont feel being left out.
Discussion in Lubuntu team:
As Lubuntu supports the lower end machines and servers efficient, We discussed about the dropping in yesterday’s meeting. When asked, Gilir told that we have to wait till the team takes the final decision. We are not sure about what is going to happen. But We should support them and that is my view. All that happens from now are not in our hands.
Suggestions regarding this topic is always welcome. I will find more links to contact and talk about this issue.