Fedora 37 Looks To Deprecate Legacy BIOS Support

[direc85]

Note, tho, bleeding edge distros are about bleeding edge code, so it's not strictly incompatible with running on older hardware. See, for example, Arch Linux 32. You have the very latest packages running on pretty ancient hardware. But the ones who want it that way should put the work, rather than always expect a third party to serve them for no reason at all.

Excellent example of a feature that was not supported anymore, but the community picked up. True, bleeding edge in the context of a Linux distro means the code and not the hardware, but at some point legacy code and compatibility start to hinder progress, or can at least make things unnecessarily complex. Someone has to be the first one to drop a feature. (Remember when Apple dropped the 3,5" drive?) I'm not familiar with BIOS vs. UEFI and what features are supported by which, but I appreciate the thought of getting rid of something full of legacy code and quirks, in order to focus on the next thing that will at some point be the only thing.

As a data point, my home server is a decade old, from 2012, and it has 16 cores and 128 GB of RAM with 48 TB of storage. [...] Asking someone to trash a secure reliable 16 core 128 GB machine because it's not bleeding edge enough is asinine and is the kind of mindset responsible for the global e-waste crisis.

Let's pretend for a second that Ubuntu 22.04 LTS was the last in its series to support BIOS. It's going to be supported until April 2032 (with free Ubuntu Advantage registration), that's ten years from now. At that time your home server would be 20 years old, and that's a very respectable service life for an electronic device of any kind! Is that not enough support in the worst possible imaginary case?

As stated many times before, Fedora is not meant to be the distribution with the widest range of devices supported including the oldest devices. BIOS support in itself isn't going anywhere, grub isn't going anywhere, no computers are getting scrapped. BIOS support is possibly going to be removed from the most bleeding edge distro to see the effects it has (in the code base as well as in the community). Why on earth would that be a bad thing to do?

[sinepgib]

Excellent example of a feature that was not supported anymore, but the community picked up. True, bleeding edge in the context of a Linux distro means the code and not the hardware, but at some point legacy code and compatibility start to hinder progress, or can at least make things unnecessarily complex. Someone has to be the first one to drop a feature. (Remember when Apple dropped the 3,5" drive?) I'm not familiar with BIOS vs. UEFI and what features are supported by which, but I appreciate the thought of getting rid of something full of legacy code and quirks, in order to focus on the next thing that will at some point be the only thing.

I definitely agree here. There's a point where you can just diverge if needed anyway. For example, distros aimed at older hardware do exist, so you don't need to keep the new hardware stuck in time to support the ancient one. My comment was simply a nit about how "bleeding edge" is used in this context, nothing more.
There are of course cases where old hardware conflicts with bleeding edge software, of course, even if some not theoretically but only in practice.

[horizonbrave]

This is stupid, it's too soon!

Glad I'm not a Fedora user

So many valid arguments in your post, such value!

Too idiot

[wR3n]

Hey, I could give you $1000 and you will show me how to use the official Windows 11 ISO to install Windows on a system without Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 without modifying anything or messing with the boot media.

Not sure why I'm bothering, you'll probably consider this "mOdIfYiNg" if you consider editing registry on an install of Windows loaded in RAM, "mOdIfYiNg" it.

So, before booting the ISO, ensure that you have a partition already made.

Once booted into the ISO, press Shift+F10, this will open CMD. (You might need to click next before doing this, not sure.)

You can type

notepad

and press enter to open notepad. The save as dialog can be used to check drive letters. (However to make this example simple, I'll use C as the drive to install on, and D as the drive that contains your install USB/DVD.)

Type

dism /Get-WimInfo /WimFile:D:\Sources\install.wim

and press enter. This shows every edition of Windows in the ISO, and gives you the proper index number for the next command. (If this doesn't work, try install.esd instead of install.wim)

Type

dism /Apply-Image /ImageFile:D:\Sources\install.wim /index:1 /ApplyDir:C:\

and press enter. This will write Windows 11 to the drive.

Once that is finished, type

C:\Windows\System32\bcdboot C:\Windows

this will install the bootloader onto the drive.

Now you can reboot into Windows 11, installed just with CMD. I actually use this method to install all versions of Windows (8 and newer) as it's faster and I avoid the buggy Windows Setup experience.

Then don't use fedora. Why the fuck would you use a distro whose mission statement is bleeding edge and breaking backwards compatibility for the sake of moving forward if you needed legacy support for some random hardware? One of if not the first to switch to systemd, first to switch to pipewire, one of the first to work toward sunsetting i386, first to default to wayland by multiple years. This is how fedora has been for as long as I have been following it. If legacy support for a piece of hardware is something you need then you should be using something that isn't fedora. Consider Ubuntu or Debian or RHEL. RHEL 9 will be supported until past 2030. If by the time 2030 rolls around you still require multi-decade dead legacy support options then you are just going to need to consider your options when that time comes.

I'm interested in Fedora, because The Linux Experiment hailed it as the next Ubuntu, and I'm interested in a Linux distro to try moving to when Windows 7/8 starts to become unusable. However, I will not enable UEFI boot for any reason, even though my hardware supports it. UEFI boot is inferior to legacy boot and secure boot can be used to control the system and prevent users from installing a non-verified OS.

Also you're recommending trash, hard to install, and paid Linux distro. Really?

[Mez']

if you want to run decade old hardware then maybe a bleeding edge distro that is known to be paving the path toward the future before anyone else and who is the first to deprecate legacy stuff just isn't the distro for you.

It´s never been known for that. Except for the usual Fedora cultists.
But good one, made me laugh.

[deant]

Sticking to good ol` debian then.

[zparihar]

This is a dumb move... pretty reckless and not necessary. Globally, we're not in the most ideal of environment, a very likely economic depression coming and already a shortage of components...

You know...Debian... I think they're the only reliable ones... seriously. I'm gonna be all in now in promoting them. I feel like too many distros are forgetting about a substantial amount of users (and hardware). There's no reason for a lot of those hardware to be E-Waste and we need to encourage more users to hold on to an not trash their hardware.

Seriously disappointed...

[RahulSundaram]

This is a dumb move... pretty reckless and not necessary

I would recommend reading the change proposal. It shows that this has already been proposed before and turned down. Change proposals routinely don't get accepted in Fedora and put off for a long time or substantially revised based on the feedback. If you have specific concerns not already talked about in that thread, I would recommend bringing it up the development list.

[arQon]

> This change proposal is well past due

err... no it isn't. There's very little reason for this other than at best an attempt at "novelty" signaling or something.

The vast majority of the (personal) machines I support for seniors etc are BIOS-only, and those are mostly i5 laptops that are far from "the world has moved on, and such machines aren't capable of running 'modern' software". That's a lie, plain and simple.

Fedora isn't my distro of choice anyway, but this sort of stupidity would certainly be enough of a reason to change that preference if it was. That said, if Fedora's target market is DCs-only then it wouldn't be a problem: but that seems much more like RHEL's territory.

edit> Given Rahul's comment above, this seems to be a case of just one idi^W person making a lot of noise with very little thought attached to it, and the people who actually consider things for more than 5 seconds will rightfully reject it.

[calc]

if Fedora's target market is DCs-only then it wouldn't be a problem: but that seems much more like RHEL's territory.

Fedora exists primarily as a source to feed into RHEL so you might not be far off. If Red Hat wants a major change to happen they do it first in Fedora before bringing it into RHEL.