After several flavors of Linux I ve landed on EOS. I like what I see, and plan on staying. My one year old desktop is running it just fine, but my laptop, a Dell Precision 5520, is 3 years old. What kind of hardware support can I expect in another few years? Does EOS plan on supporting older, or even, out dated tech?
We try to support older hardware with the installer as long as it is practical and easy for us to do so. We still have people using equipment that is 15+ years old.
However, for an existing installed system, anything that can run on Arch should also work on EOS.
That being said, we are not a distro specialized for supporting older hardware and can’t guarantee anything.
I wouldn’t call that outdated tech even in a few years. You’ll be fine.
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As a general rule of thumb (roughly), the older the hardware the more likely it is supported.
My personal experience with EndeavourOS, I installed it on a 10 year old laptop and another one like 6-8 years old, the maximum RAM I could remember on any of them was no more than 4 GB, all worked perfectly.
The laptops were responsive as a brand new latest laptop with Windoze, even more.
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To be humble, that s the type of answer I did not want to see. The reason being, how is a lame end user, (me), to know what is practical when it comes to programming, as, I am not a programmer myself?
Basically what I am saying is that we try to support older hardware in the installer but can’t give you a specific guarantee. We are not a distro that only supports very recent hardware. We are also not a distro that focuses on only supporting older hardware.
We currently have people using 15+ year old hardware with EOS. In general, I would say it is not something to worry about unless the hardware is very old. For example, you can’t run EOS on 32-bit CPUs so if you were thinking of running a Pentium III from 1999, it won’t work.
Here, EOS KDE runs smoothly on a 12-year-old i5 2500K with an equally old motherboard and 8 GB RAM. An upgrade to AMD Ryzen 7 5800X is planned, but that will take some time.
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I have a 5800x also on standby. Currently using the 3800x and it is awesome. I set my UEFI settings to use 65w ECO mode.
Could you show us the machine info, for example with command
inxi -Fza | eos-sendlog
and show the returned address here.
You don’t have to install to do so, simply boot with the USB installer and run this terminal command.
I’m also running EndeavourOS on a 12 years old laptop, and a brand new laptop bought earlier this year. Both work without issues.
I have EOS running on a very old DELL Studio 1558 without any problems. I do not know how old it is, I once got it as a gift from someone because windows no longer ran on it 
I only had to change the WiFi module to get a bit more speed.
This is me new PC:
~ î‚° inxi -F
System:
Host: ryzen Kernel: 6.4.3-zen1-1-zen arch: x86_64 bits: 64
Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 5.27.6 Distro: EndeavourOS
Machine:
Type: Desktop Mobo: Gigabyte model: B550 AORUS ELITE V2
serial: <superuser required> UEFI: American Megatrends LLC. v: F14e
date: 10/13/2021
CPU:
Info: 8-core model: AMD Ryzen 7 5700G with Radeon Graphics bits: 64
type: MT MCP cache: L2: 4 MiB
Speed (MHz): avg: 1674 min/max: 1400/4672 cores: 1: 1400 2: 1400 3: 1400
4: 1400 5: 2395 6: 1400 7: 2395 8: 1400 9: 1400 10: 3800 11: 1400 12: 1400
13: 1400 14: 1400 15: 1400 16: 1400
Graphics:
Device-1: AMD Navi 23 [Radeon RX 6600/6600 XT/6600M] driver: amdgpu
v: kernel
Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.8 with: Xwayland v: 23.1.2 driver: X:
loaded: amdgpu unloaded: modesetting,radeon dri: radeonsi gpu: amdgpu
resolution: 1920x1080
API: OpenGL v: 4.6 Mesa 23.1.3 renderer: AMD Radeon RX 6600 (navi23 LLVM
15.0.7 DRM 3.52 6.4.3-zen1-1-zen)
Audio:
Device-1: AMD Navi 21/23 HDMI/DP Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
Device-2: AMD Renoir Radeon High Definition Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
Device-3: AMD Family 17h/19h HD Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
Device-4: Logitech V10 Notebook Speakers
driver: hid-generic,snd-usb-audio,usbhid type: USB
API: ALSA v: k6.4.3-zen1-1-zen status: kernel-api
Server-1: PipeWire v: 0.3.73 status: active
Network:
Device-1: Realtek RTL8125 2.5GbE driver: r8169
IF: enp7s0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: d8:5e:d3:5b:ab:15
Drives:
Local Storage: total: 3.18 TiB used: 1.71 TiB (53.9%)
ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Samsung model: SSD 980 PRO 250GB
size: 232.89 GiB
ID-2: /dev/nvme1n1 vendor: Samsung model: SSD 980 PRO 1TB size: 931.51 GiB
ID-3: /dev/sda vendor: Toshiba model: HDWD110 size: 931.51 GiB
ID-4: /dev/sdb vendor: Toshiba model: HDWD110 size: 931.51 GiB
ID-5: /dev/sdc vendor: Crucial model: CT240BX500SSD1 size: 223.57 GiB
ID-6: /dev/sdd vendor: Kingston model: DataTraveler 3.0 size: 7.2 GiB
type: USB
Partition:
ID-1: / size: 227.69 GiB used: 38.53 GiB (16.9%) fs: ext4
dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2
ID-2: /home size: 915.82 GiB used: 68.45 GiB (7.5%) fs: ext4
dev: /dev/nvme1n1p1
Swap:
ID-1: swap-1 type: file size: 16 GiB used: 31.2 MiB (0.2%) file: /swapfile
Sensors:
System Temperatures: cpu: 52.2 C mobo: 38.0 C gpu: amdgpu temp: 45.0 C
Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A gpu: amdgpu fan: 0
Info:
Processes: 402 Uptime: 12h 8m Memory: total: 16 GiB available: 15.47 GiB
used: 5.64 GiB (36.5%) Shell: fish inxi: 3.3.28
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The biggest concern before, was the support of both 32 bits and 64 bits architecture. When you see how long Linux support old hardware, I don’t see why you’re worried, unless you intend to keep your laptop for 20 years or more.
My computer has a CPU from 2012, a motherboard from 2012 and a GPU from 2017.
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Ryzen 7 ,5700/6600 GPU
You’re fine for a very long time.
PS, that’s not out dated at all. They still make and sell that stuff.
Edit: I responded to the wrong person.
Sweet computer, I also have very similar specs on mine.
I do have a old Fujitsu-Siemens T5010 from approx. 2009 running with EOS. Not as daily driver but still in use to display the family calendar in thunderbird lightning. The only thing no more working is the build-in wacom screen to be used with the pen. It stopped working some day in the past after some updates of libwacom or/and the kernel. I never managed to get it running again.
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I would start worrying when Distros start dropping x64. But that will probably not happen within the next 20 years.