Could and Did are two distinct words in the English language. Very few 486 machines ever existed with more than 64MB of RAM. They were for insanely niche applications. Now we change the debate from do we support what is today an incredibly rare architecture, to do we support what is today an incredibly rare architecture for the purpose of a niche that almost certainly doesn't exist anymore on that platform?

We can keep going down this rabbit hole of "but it did support", only to find there's a single machine on the planet that actually had that hardware config, and Bob hasn't used that machine in decades.

Are you talking about professional well made IoT devices designed for corporate management? Because holy shit are you wrong about general consumer IoT devices doing no listening. There's a reason for the running joke that the S in IoT stands for security.

In fact much of the community driven IoT interfaces for tinkerers rely on the fact that someone has hacked a device almost universally via an active open listening port to force it to work with something other than it's Cloud service.

Your best beat at security: Isolate them on your network and firewall your inbound connections.

From the most current OS/2 release:

"Hardware Requirements
Intel Pentium Pro or higher, or an AMD Athlon or higher. 64 Bit CPUs are supported (however ArcaOS will run in 32-bit mode). Computers with ARM CPUs are not supported. Apple Computers are not supported (regardless of CPU). The Vortex86 CPU is not sufficiently compatible to run ArcaOS and is not supported."

i.e. minimum hardware requirements are a 686 instruction set.

Linux isn't suitable as a real-time OS now either strictly speaking. In fact that one of the top hits from a search on Linux RTOS is a paper from NASA (from a comparatively recent 2019) discussing the performance of Linux with every RTOS relevant kernel feature set into the most ideal position. Their conclusion was... well you probably will hit your event deadline if you throw fast enough hardware at it, but it is still nothing like a true RTOS.

The answer is rather simple: don’t upgrade the kernel to a newer version. At this point, any kernel features added would not benefit a 486. Existing and working code is unaffected.

Who is throwing away working code? New versions of Linux will not support x486 processors. The keyword is "new". Existing versions will still work. All versions are archived for people to use. And Linux is still open source. Anyone who want to modify Linux going forward to support 486 is free to do so.

You almost figured it out. It's almost like when we use a completely different vehicle where everything including all technology inside is different that you want to test things slowly before jumping feet first down on the moon.

No, this is the first in the missions for the Orange Nazi to build his moon base.

If you ask Claude about any of these features, it will deny that they exist.

It makes you wonder. Were they removed from the models that are currently running, or was Claude taught to not disclose their existence?

You have a short memory. This shit show isn't worse than the past. MS very much pushed out colossally fucked up updates, even back in the XP days. Heck back then, before the days of automated recovery processes shit was MUCH worse. There were actual updates that may have forced you to go looking for your Windows XP install disc to fix.

Your comment fails for the same reason. By your reasoning you don't know anything about Microsoft's process but you're declaring victory for Open Source. The reality is that everything who makes this an open vs closed issue is very ignorantly missing the underlying fact that security update affect all platforms and all practices for releasing code, open or closed. Just in different ways.

It does not. Zero-days are a thing on Linux. EOL is a thing on Linux, and many modern distros very much will force auto-update packages marked as a security risk.

Congrats, you so clever. All users did this in the 90s. It was a security nightmare, especially when people were proud of running out of date buggy software. You may be an expert and capable of curating your update process (I'll give you the benefit of doubt, generous of me since you think this concept is OS related) but that doesn't mean what you do is even remotely appropriate for 99% of users out there, regardless of what OS they use.

And yet the answer is actually yes. Unless all you do is Linux command line stuff or browse static webpages using a browser that last was standards compliant in the early 2000s, 4GB is not longer a viable minimum for anyone who doesn't also spend their evenings self-flagellating. It's masochistic to use an underperforming computer.

The internet is dynamic. Lazy loading is an optimisation technique that makes the browser experience better for the 99.99% of people currently *not* sitting at the airport about to board a flight.

What you really want to do is save the page. Chrome has that function, though I suspect it will have other problems, but it very much does load all images and make the page static (many webpages have an expiry / timeout period so even if you pre-loaded the tab, activating it 30min later will cause it to attempt to reload). There's a shitload of things preventing you doing what you want to do, you really need to find another solution.

Print to PDF may work too?

Lazy-loading is not load on demand. It's literally loading it when it gets close to the viewport, in advance, before the user actually sees it or clicks on it. It's the middle thing between loading on demand, and pre-loading every element on the page.