There’s a good explanation about that here: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

The issue is that a lot of sites used the user-agent to determine if the browser supported particular features (e.g. show a fancy version of a site if the user is using Netscape, otherwise show a basic version for Mosaic, lynx, etc). New browsers had to pretend to be the old good browsers to get the good versions of sites

This is why getting rid of the user agent is a good thing. Sniffing the UA is a mess.

Do they use the BSD userland instead? Interesting…

I think Alpine uses Busybox, but it’s feasible for a Linux distro to use BSD coreutils. Not sure if any do that, though.

User agents were commonly used for the wrong reasons - fingerprinting, sites that block particular browsers rather than using proper feature detection, etc. so I’m glad to see them slowly going away.

Interesting… I didn’t realise Skylake isn’t supported. I agree with your comment. I thought people were talking about much older equipment.

TPM 2 has been around since 2015ish and I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows starts relying on it more heavily. A lot of businesses have already required employees to use computers with TPM 2.0 for a long time, and enterprise use is a big focus for Microsoft.

not counting systems that use the Linux kernel but aren’t considered a traditional GNU+Linux desktop.

Does that mean you don’t count Alpine towards Linux market share? It mostly doesn’t use any GNU stuff.

You can also compile the kernel with LLVM instead of gcc, use musl instead of glibc, and use BSD coreutils instead of GNU coreutils.

User agent strings are frozen these days, at least in Chrome. They still have the browser major version and OS name at least, but Windows will always report Windows 10, Android will always report Android 10, MacOS will always report 10.15.7, and Linux is just “Linux x86_64”: https://www.chromium.org/updates/ua-reduction/

User agent strings are essentially deprecated and nobody should be using them any more. They’ve been replaced by User-Agent Client Hints, where the site can request the data it needs, and some high-entropy things (ie fields that vary a lot between users) can prompt the user for permission to share them first.

The thing is that most Windows users don’t care and will continue to use it. People like you and I know about the benefits of Linux, but sometimes we overestimate how much regular users care about the OS they’re using.

Forced restart for software updates

If anything, they’re moving in the opposite direction. Windows Server 2025 is going to support hotpatching, which means that system updates can be applied without needing to reboot. Not sure if the technology will come to consumer Windows though.

Require new CPUs and motherboards / hardware, ignoring the market for old computers.

How long do you expect legacy hardware to be supported for?

Could you go over some of your reasoning + need for the networking equipment you have?

I have a 10Gbps internet connection (only costs $40/month in my area) so I wanted a 10Gbps router. The TP-Link ER8411 is currently the cheapest 10Gbps router that can actually achieve 10Gbps NAT throughput.

However, that router only has 1Gbps RJ45 ports, not 10Gbps. I wanted to get 10Gbps over regular CAT6 cable, so I needed a 10Gbps switch too. The MikroTik is very good value for money - a lot of other brands only have 2.5Gbps switcheswith one or two 10Gbps ports for the same price as the one I’ve got (that has 12 x 10Gbps ports).

I needed a PoE (Power over Ethernet) switch for my security cameras. TP-Link TL-SG1218MPE is a good deal at only $200 for 16 PoE ports. I was looking at a cheaper one that’s $110 for 8 PoE ports (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1090765-REG/tp_link_tl_sg2210p_8_port_gigabit_poe_smart.html/), but it’s not rack mountable, and buying a rack mountable case for it from somewhere like Etsy brings the price very close to the price of the 16-port switch.

Hope that helps :)

no switch since I cannot find a switch that is affordable and runs FOSS software

If you get a “dumb” unmanaged switch, it’s literally just a purpose-built switch chip connected to the Ethernet ports. There’s not really any software running on it, and in fact there’s way more proprietary code running on a PC in the CPU’s microcode :)

the “router” will do the switching for me through bridged ports

The downside of this is that you may not get line speed through all ports simultaneously. There are some PCIe network cards that have 4 ports and a switch chip for line-rate switching between the ports, but I’ve never actually seen one in real life.