I was looking for a custom ROM for my current phone, and I came across this. Personally, I think that this is a very misleading comment, and has quite a bit of factual inaccuracies.
I have found that, despite being more recent, linux kernel 6.1 LTS works better with a core2duo than WinXP or Win7.
However, when using a DE, I cannot use KDE or GNOME on a 2GB RAM computer. It is simply not enough. On base, it uses around 1.6GB which is almost 80%. But XFCE works okayish.
On a 4GB+ RAM PC, it works flawlessly. Whether it is an older or modern CPU.
While the point of obsolescence stands, it is not enough. For example I have used a GSI android 12 on an huawei android 8 phone. It has worked better than the android 8 version.
But… 2GB of RAM is not enough to accomodate a modern android experience, on that he is right. If you want Android 12/13/14 you might want to have at the very least 4GB of RAM. Swap spaces help but are not enough.
what this guy is saying is uh… a little bit gibberishy.
it is true that hardware capabilities can be insufficient though. if you dont have enough ram, storage or cpu power, as the software gets more complex you can start running into its limits. it takes waaaaaaay more than a couple of years for this to happen.
when it comes to android the reason you don’t get many updates is simply because manufacturers don’t want to spend the time and money to update a device that is usually built with planned obsolescence in mind anyway. getting you to buy a new one is more lucrative to them and very few exceptions exist.
most of the time, if the rom is well made you can get a newer android version on it no problem. my device stops at a11 officially, but im running a13 on it, and it runs much better than stock. i had an a4.4 device i upgraded all the way to a8 before it died.
android is not that resource intensive if you run a lean rom and you can usually get several more years worth of updates on most phones.
one thing you have to be wary about is that these roms are built by the community, so it may or may not be a good rom with everything working in good order, but thats not necessarily because of hardware limitations.
A Pentium 4 2.0 has 400 MHz. EACH 100mhz translates more or less to 5-15 khz of electrical power the cpu needs to process the information, the data.
BUT if you install windows 11 or 10, you will face unconsistent algorythmical graphic/memory processes (This is what we call lag) core processing and clock problems, 'MEMORY LEAKING problems' or over saturations of the system.
🤦
So, the absurdity of this post aside, it is of course the case that software tends to increase its minimum hardware requirements.
However, it is still possible to browse the internet using a much-more-than-10-year-old computer running up-to-date free/libre open source software today.
The version of Debian that came out this year still includes support for its so-called “i386” architecture, which will sadly not run on an actual 386 anymore but will still work on many 686 CPUs made before the turn of the century.
With phones, the biggest problem is that (unlike with PCs) each device requires a large amount of device-specific development work which is often not upstreamed and thus not maintained by anyone.
Whether or not a random phone made in the last decade can run a modern version of Android depends mostly on if a sufficiently-determined hacker happens to own one and be willing to release images for it. But, even when they are, they typically aren’t motivated enough to provide ongoing security updates, so, performance aside, Android on anything but the latest phones is typically not very “safe” from a security standpoint.
https://postmarketos.org/ is a non-Android Linux distribution aiming to keep older devices working with modern (and security updated) software. If you’re lucky enough to have one of the devices it supports, I highly recommend it!
If you have an Android device which nobody is maintaining any software for, you should assume that it could easily be compromised and should probably not connect it to the internet.
The device is a Redmi 9A. The mobile processor I’m using is a Mediatek Helio G25, with 2GB of RAM. Apparently, it is a “gaming” processor released in 2020. And I don’t do a lot of heavy stuff, just listen to pre-downloaded music and browse the internet using Firefox Android.
Someone was working on porting pmOS to it just a few months ago, so maybe one day that will be an option but it isn’t currently. I’d keep an eye on that repo and the pmOS devices page and hopefully it will run pmOS eventually.
Meanwhile I see Lineage also doesn’t have official support for the Redmi 9A yet (though they do for the Redmi 9) but it sounds like there are unofficial builds which supposedly work on it.
Personally I wouldn’t run an operating system built and distributed by some random forum user, but if you’re feeling adventurous you could try. This page purports to have instructions for installing Lineage on it, as well as several other Android builds, and it ultimately instructs you to download the image from this lengthy forum thread in Russian about the Redmi 9A which also has lots of other images supposedly built for that device. Good luck 😀
Nonsense.
Minimum requirements go up a little, but the reason they don’t support modern versions is exclusively cost cutting.
And it’s definitely not true with Linux. They occasionally abandon old, dead hardware when the development effort is too high for the benefit, but for the most part mainstream hardware will still work as well or better on modern versions.
