It depends. On older devices there isn’t much testing of newer versions of the kernel so they can be more broken than an older version.
Case in point, recently on an old laptop (~12 years) I noticed video performance was real bad which I later found out was due to modern distros defaulting to the iHD intel graphics driver. But iHD is only supported from 5th gen (Broadwell) onward. So, on older devices anything depending on the graphics driver for hardware acceleration (like video decode) fails and falls back to software rendering.
kungen@feddit.nu 1 year ago
Haven’t Debian and most other distros stopped supporting “i386” for quite a while now? I remember reading something like that, but they still have 32-bit isos up.
zurohki@aussie.zone 1 year ago
IIRC a bunch of distros moved to i586 or i686 as their minimum CPU version, which means packages get compiled with instructions that aren’t supported by 386 and 486 CPUs. So those 32-bit ISOs only work on relatively recent 32-bit chips and will crash on chips which are 30+ years old.