Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Unlock instant access to exclusive member features. Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards. It's a given that the question "What's the oldest computer you can run modern Linux on?" would produce a more gratifying answer than "What's the oldest computer you can run modern Windows on?" given Windows 11's draconian hardware requirements. But I have to say I had no idea the answer to the former question dated back to the 1990s—or, depending on your perspective, the 1980s. Alas, all computers must eventually make their way to the great e-waste center in the sky, as Phoronix reports that the Linux kernel maintainers are beginning to phase out support for Intel's legendary 486 platform. The i486 debuted in 1989, with some of the later chips in the line dramatically improving performance over the prior generation i386 despite still being measured in double-digit megahertz. The final desktop 486 CPUs were released in 1995 and ceased production in 1998, as Intel moved into the Pentium era. But Intel actually kept manufacturing 486 chips for embedded systems until 2007, technically making it merely 19 years past its true end-of-life. That's still, uh, pretty old, which makes it hard to argue with the father of Linux, Linus Torvalds, when he says it's time to drop support for the 486. "I *really* don't think i486 class hardware is relevant any more," he wrote. "Yes, I'm sure it exists … but from a kernel development standpoint I don't think they are really relevant. "At some point, people have them as museum pieces. They might as well run museum kernels." Torvalds actually wrote that back in October 2022, but it took a few years for the kernel developers to get around to dropping it. But it's finally happening. A patch expected to be merged into Linux 7.1 will begin rooting out the remaining code dedicated to the i486,