Comment by geerlingguy
1 day ago
There's still a thriving (albeit small) community of skateboarders, retro enthusiasts, and even some AV pros who have FireWire equipment in active use.
In the kernel, the last commit in the IEEE 1394 area was a month or so ago—it's not 'active' maintenance, but its definitely being maintained, and is quite stable in my testing. (Thanks a ton to the current maintainer, who's going to go through the 3 year process of sunsetting full kernel support, and coordinating that with external projects!)
Why sunset it, though? There’s still floppy, atapi, and zip support.
Every Apple device from the late 90s to 2012 had FireWire. Most Sony PCs from the late 90s to 2009. Google estimates that at over 100M systems with FireWire. There were 50M Zip drives, in comparison.
I know I should probably move on, but I have a lot of FireWire block devices and video equipment. The disk/disc drives can be moved to USB, but the video equipment cannot.
People moved from "good to have" to "better to throw it out because it's unmaintained so it's not secure".
And floppy support is needed for cloud-init, heh.
By "people" you mean the corporate interests.
That’s actually pretty cool, I’m surprised there’s skateboarders that still use VX1000s or whatever instead of moving on to GoPros etc
Older cameras have a certain "look" that can be hard to manually reproduce. I've been considering getting an older digital (maybe DV) camcorder for exactly that reason, I find that "look" very charming, and it makes it look more like what I associate with a "home video"