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Cake day: June 13th, 2025

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  • It isn’t a question of “How long are they supposed to support it for”; it’s a matter of “Don’t artificially break things”.

    As to Linux distro EOLs, they’re are bad examples for several reasons:

      1. Linux distros are being provided to us for free – Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
      1. Linux distro EOLs are generally a very different beast than a Windows EOL: They change your user experience and may break some beloved software, but they generally don’t make core hardware components unusable, let alone entire computers.
      1. When the Linux kernel does discontinue support for some very old hardware, we still have the source code of the last version available and are free to build some continuation. When your Windows updates end, you’re left with nothing. And that’s not just a theoretical option (which, however, is important enough in itself!): Only in the case of 35-year old hardware is it unlikely that people would actually do that work (on the kernel and all the relevant higher-level software). If – by contrast – the Linux kernel team would for no good reason stop supporting hardware that’s a mere 10 years old, you betcha there would be people starting work to fill in the void (starting with current kernel devs who don’t agree with that decision). Why? Because that’s what Linux community is doing right now and has been doing for decades – keeping up support for hardware way older than 10 years.
      1. Linux developers are credible when they say that a decision to drop support for some old thing is because continuation would be to much work. Sure, also for Windows 10, economic unfeasability of further maintenance might have been the reason why they discontinued it. However, over the course of years and decades, Microsoft has given us countless well-documented reasons to suspect that their decision here is not because they have, to their own displeasure, concluded that the burden of continued support has become too heavy, but because they’ve spotted some new way to make money and/or reinforce their market dominance in various segments, to which people’s ability to stick with their current systems is an impediment. Since people not having a TPM2 on their computers is extremely unlikely to require much additional effort on Microsoft’s side to keep them supported, this is all the more likely to be the case, and that’s what the plaintiff’s claim is.








  • Thank you, in fact I ended up doing something that’s mathematically pretty much just that: I have the previous line stored in an auxiliary variable lastline, and it is the evaluation of the current line $0 that determines whether the previous line gets printed.

    awk -v threshold=150 'BEGIN {lastline=""}
      (lastline!="" && threshold<$0){print lastline} #the additional check lastline!="" prevents an empty line at the very beginning
      {lastline=$0}
      END{print} #hardcode printing of the very last line, because otherwise it would never be printed
    ' 
    

    Of note, in the case where some list entries are repeated, the behavior of this script will be:

    • The threshold value, if it’s in the list, will always be printed just once, even if it occurs multiple times in the list, and also if it happens to be the first, last, or only entry in the list.
    • All larger entries will be printed exactly as often as they occur in the list. This even holds for the largest value: its last repetition will be printed via the final END{print} statement, whereas all preceding instances get printed through the statement that depends on threshold<$0.

    (IIRC, it was a StackOverflow post that led me to this.)