28 years after the final Intel 486 desktop CPUs rolled off assembly lines, Linux is finally dropping support for it

A lot of industrial and commercial hardware using Windows was abandoned by the manufacturer decades ago. There is a lot of hardware that still needs Windows XP to control, some even stuck on Windows 98. As aging hardware breaks it is becoming harder to find replacements. For a lot of this, the software to run it is so focused that emulation layers cause issues.