yes but older hardware and older cpus are becoming deprecated by the linux kernel developers.
You're grasping at straws. Try to find a new Windows version that runs on 35 year old hardware.
so what's the big deal then about the UTXO set getting too bloated?
With just 8 GB RAM, Bitcoin Core is pounding my SSD at maximum capacity for hours during IBD. Even though it's just a one-time thing, it's only getting worse.
The solution to your problem is to get a more poweful CPU and alot more RAM. To be quite honest, that's the only solution to your problem. And maybe a faster SSD. Is your SSD NVME or is it SATA? Maybe you need to get an NVME one.[/quote]
You're missing the point. You asked why a large UTXO set is a problem, and your solution is to buy more RAM? So in the same post in which you argued Linux is removing support for systems with 4 MB RAM, you argue 8 GB isn't enough. I'd argue adding more RAM doesn't scale well: what if there are 100 times more UTXOs? Add 2 TB RAM to run Bitcoin Core?
I'm still baffled how, and i know this might sound a bit off topic, but how downloading the entire blockchain is apparently some type of CPU/RAM/SSD-HDD intensive process. That makes no sense to me.
Downloading isn't resource intensive,
verifying all data is what gets you.
1) download all the raw data
2) once download is complete, then process the data
to me that seems more reasonable than trying to do both things at once.
It won't be faster, and it won't reduce system load. Besides, if you downloaded one wrong bit in a block, you'll have to start over.