Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote:
No but it does mean that they cant run indefinitely
Only if the spare parts that are not available actually fail (and if you
cannot find the spare parts through less official channels, such as buying
another broken computer where the part you need is still working). And, as
explained elsewhere in this thread, the parts most likely to fail can
actually be replaced with generic replacements.
Also keep in mind that many Fedora users have one or two computers, not
hundreds. That makes it much less likely to run into a hardware failure in a
given time interval, and there is very little incentive to "fix" what is not
broken.
And there needs to be a number on this to adjust users expectation
and
10 years is a reasonable number from a business, parts and
recycle/re-use availability,
10 years is *not* a reasonable number when a notebook still runs great after
14 years.
What is unreasonable is to be expecting that it's supported
indefinitely
from OS and or HW vendors.
One of the reasons people use GNU/Linux is exactly to escape the hardware
manufacturers' planned obsolescence treadmill.
Kevin Kofler