alt Hacker News20 years isn't all that much though. We maintain houses for much longer than that so why should we accept such low lifetimes for computers.
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You can put in parts and effort to maintain older computers, but when you can buy a brand new desktop for $120 or a few year old one for $40 and they blow it out of the water on performance and power efficiency, what's the reason to do so? (I'm asking in the context of a main computer, not something to run old games natively or be nostalgic about.)
A computer you buy today will be much more viable in 20+ years than a 20+ year old computer is right now. We were still in the extreme part of speed and density growth back than, and it will lessen every decade.
One of the dumbest things I've heard today...
Houses are obviously very different to computers. Do you also demand 20 year lifetimes for your socks?
You might still be able to install linux, just not with the latest kernel.
Because they're fundamentally different things? A house is a machine for providing weather protection. The difference between a modern house and an old one is pretty minor. A computer is a machine for doing calculations. The difference between a modern computer and an old one is - by more or less any metric you can think of - many orders of magnitude. Calculations per Watt, calculations per second, calculations per unit volume etc.
It's not even like we're breaking them. This is just the maintainers of the Linux kernel choosing to not spend their time maintaining compatibility with the old architectures.