Aside from all of the planned obsolescence that others are talking about in the comments (which rightfully deserves discussion), i can't help but to feel like this hardly works for information and communication technology devices - smartphones, tablets, laptops/netbooks, desktop computers, consoles etc.

The industry as a whole has this odd desire to always push for better hardware and newer things, to the point where Windows 11 refused to support older AMD processors and whatnot. At the same time, Android 8.1 (the OS on one of my older phones) has been abandoned and thus makes the device not an entirely viable backup phone; unless i'm okay with running insecure software, or want to install custom ROMs that will break things, especially in the case of a non-mainstream vendor.

To me, it feels like we should stop forcing progress before its time has come, which we currently do with better hardware that is used in suboptimal ways and tossing aside everything that can't keep up, as opposed to actually investing decades to write better software.

Right now, my desktop PC has a 1st gen Ryzen 3 1200. If it were not for the OS, the browser and almost every piece of software and even game that i want to play becoming more bloated, i could safely use it for a decade with no issues, Wirth's law be damned. In my servers i have 200GEs that are similarly old and yet, are fully sufficient for my homelab needs, but eventually you won't be able to buy any old new stock for reasonable prices, because AMD will be off chasing whatever new skew or technology they need to remain competitive.

Even Firefox, the browser that was supposed to be "the good one" (e.g. default in most Linux distros, less controversial than Chrome/Chromium) got noticeably worse sometime around the Quantum upgrade in regards to its RAM usage, even when you limit its content process count to just 1. Similarly, it feels like most IDEs nowadays are also somewhat heavyweight - why can't i have exceedingly boring looking software that has a lot of the smart autocomplete that i'd expect, yet doesn't slow the whole machine down when things need to be re-rendered because of a non-native UI toolkit? Just look at how snappy Lazarus is: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ And yet, i cannot feasibly do webdev or many projects with it, because no hype means no new tools, no ecosystem support and so on, so i'm essentially dragged along to use whatever the modern tech choices are, like JetBrains products which are admittedly otherwise great and allow me to work with almost every popular tech stack, yet still eat lots of RAM.

I guess this is less of a rant and more of a question to the people here: how do you fight back against this supposed progress, that somehow manages to couple security updates and feature updates with otherwise unnecessary bells, whistles and unreasonable amount of browser tech and whitespace in most software? How do you fight back against your hand being forced to create e-waste?

Do you use Alpine, Debian (LXDE, LXQt or even XFCE) or another lightweight Linux distro (or even something of the BSD variety) as a daily driver and live with the fact that some software and most of gaming will often be a no-go (about 30/120 games that i have on Steam are even supported on Linux)? Do you do complicated setups with Windows VMs and GPU passthrough and relative mouse movement modes or something? Maybe you try to cut down your Windows installs as much as possible, removing bloat regularly, attempting to match Microsoft's ability to put it in, in combination with dual booting? Or do you just have a dedicated machine or two that (hopefully) aren't connected to the network and run EOL software (i've personally seen folks doing that with Windows XP), thus freeing you from updates that do things that you don't want? Or is there a really nice solution that i'm not aware of?