Linux 7.2 has landed, dragging x86 timing clean out of the nineties by making the Time Stamp Counter mandatory.
I wrote up a quick article on why ditching those ancient legacy fallbacks is good housekeeping, plus a few other bits like cache-aware scheduling and memory tweaks worth noting.
Is anyone still using legacy hardware? If so, what do you use it for?



On the other hand, Linux runs more software than its competitors, and it’s not even close.
You can (compile and) run almost all Linux software on the BSDs.
Cool. Is there any *BSD-only software I would want to run on Linux? No? Then, what’s the point?
FreeBSD’s jails are pretty interesting though, so is NetBSD’s rump kernel. But my point was (especially older) hardware support, not software support. If all you care about is the sheer number of available applications, Windows is there for you. 😉
Your post that it was “not even close” is misleading at best and utterly wrong in total.
I’m sorry, I thought we were comparing BSD to Linux. And why would I use BSD if there isn’t a single piece of software I need that isn’t available on Linux as well, but others, like Kubernetes, aren’t natively supported on BSD.
Regardless, nobody cares about dropping 486 support. NetBSD is a novelty OS at best, and FreeBSD, the most popular BSD out there, doesn’t run on 486 since 2024. Nice attempt at trolling tho.
So is Linux, compared to macOS and Windows. You still use it, as it seems to be just enough for your own needs.
Don’t be ridiculous.
Virtually every SaaS platform runs on Linux. Half of the embedded devices out there run on Linux. 70% of cellphones run on Linux. Essentially, there is no way you would be online without interacting with a Linux-based OS in one way or another.
Even compared to FreeBSD, NetBSD is more of a niche OS for hobbyists.
But NetBSD and FreeBSD can run Linux software as well?
Emulation support doesn’t imply full ABI or driver support.
Otherwise, since Proton is supported for Linux but not BSD, Linux would still be ahead.
It’s much deeper than emulation like you would a PlayStation. Last time I checked you could run steam and proton on FreeBSD
I know how it works. My point is that, if emulated software, be under a hypervisor or an ABI compatibility layer, is considered “supported”, then we could say that Windows applications are supported in Linux, but that’s not entirely true.
More importantly, if I want to run Linux software, I would rather run it on Linux, e.g. Docker and Kubernetes.