hopefully someone forks off a decent kernel

uhhh…do you have any idea how much effort would be involved in maintaining a fork of the Linux kernel, just to preserve 486 support?

this feels like a valuable door to keep open

it’s not.

it’s a vanishingly small install base, because of how slow and limited those chips are. the 486 had a whopping 1.2 million transistors. compare that to the big list on this wikipedia page. a few that stand out:

• Playstation 2 (2003) had 53 million
• Intel Core 2 Duo (2008) had 230 million
• Apple A7 (2013) used in the iPhone 5S and iPad Air had 1 billion

transistor count isn’t an exact proxy for performance, but with those orders of magnitude it puts into perspective just how underpowered that little 486 is going to be, for anything you might try to do with it in 2026.

an original, first-generation Raspberry Pi will absolutely run circles around a 486. same with going to ebay or a local pawn shop / computer refurbisher and buying the absolute oldest/cheapest used laptop you can find.

for people who already have 486s and really want to keep them going, the current Debian release still supports 486, and it’s supported until 2028 - meaning you have 2 more years of continuing to receive security updates and theoretically being safe to connect it to the internet.

and even after that, FreeBSD has “tier 2” support for 386 and higher, and NetBSD supports it as “tier 1”

and of course, nothing stops anyone from running an old kernel on their old hardware.

The Washington Department of Licensing said in a statement that it was trying to fix the Spanish option and figure out how it happened in the first place.

reading between the lines: they didn’t fucking test it at all before rolling it out.

“Your estimated wait time is less than ‘tres’ minutes,” the voice said.

yeah bro AGI is right around the corner bro I just need like 10 or 20 billion more dollars to buy more GPUs trust me bro it’s gonna be awesome