Could Linux power a computer for 20 years?

[linuxforartists]

There's a bunch fun techie interviews over at UsesThis.com. One that particularly caught my eye was an interview with Mark Pilgrim, a developer advocate at Google. It's obvious from the start he's a fan of open source.

This statement stood out:

I've had my current desktop for a little over two years. I want to continue using it for another 20. I mean that literally: this computer, this keyboard, this mouse, these three monitors. 20 years. There's no technical reason the hardware can't last that long, so it's a matter of whether there will be useful software to run on it.

What do you guys think of this experiment? Which Linux distro would be most likely to pass "The 20-year Test"? Why?

[Spice Weasel]

Since it can for 10 years, I don't see why it couldn't for 20:

http://www.bash.org/?741630

[beew]

And the point of that would be? A 20 year old computer would be super out of date and you would have a very hard time finding maintenance and use for it even if you can keep it running.

[TriBlox6432]

Yes. Just keep your current OS on it, and take very very good care of it. It will still run in 20 years . . .

But if you meant, in twenty years, using an up-to-date OS, probably not. I mean, 20 years from now we'll be having 64TB of RAM.

[wyliecoyoteuk]

My wife's 1.7Ghz P4 PC is 8 years old and runs Ubuntu 10.10 perfectly well.
Our netbooks are more recent , but both have 1.6GHz Atom processors, and yes, run Ubuntu 10.10 perfectly well.
In fact, as a technology writer, I am ashamed to admit that my youngest PC is just reaching its 4th birthday, and I don't feel any real need to upgrade it.

The path forward is to better efficiency, not more resources.

[lykwydchykyn]

20 years is a stretch, but who says the next 20 years will progress like the last 20?

I've used Debian Squeeze on Pentium 2 computers (hardware dating from ~1998 ), and it was relatively usable, provided you had a bit of patience and a relatively limited scope of uses. We could stream shoutcast radio, type text, play some (non-3d) games, and (sluggishly) browse the web, though not all at the same time .

13 years isn't 20, but it's not bad...

[Hur Dur]

Do you mean 20 years with no shutdowns? That may be a stretch, Linux isn't that stable. Although, if any distro can last that long, I'm going to say it would be Slackware. Although, I wouldn't doubt that NetBSD or FreeBSD could go 20 years non-stop on a computer.

[walt.smith1960]

Yes. Just keep your current OS on it, and take very very good care of it. It will still run in 20 years . . .

But if you meant, in twenty years, using an up-to-date OS, probably not. I mean, 20 years from now we'll be having 64TB of RAM.

And certain O.S.s will need 70% of that 64TB to echo the letters C-A-T to a monochrome display

[Dustin2128]

Lot of variables. What is the computer doing? I'm wanting to say yes, especially if it's a more stable distro like slack or debian. Of course, that all depends on hardware, can the fans handle cooling a computer that's never off? Is the hardware under plenty of stress?

[drsmooth]

I'm already at 11 years with my laptop running 9.04 and XP dual boot. Both were fresh installs XP is slow as hell. 9.04 runs great.