For 30 or so years Linux, as the ubiquitous and most popular free open source operating system, prided itself with supporting a staggering amount of different hardware architectures. For a time Linux was in a kind of "soft competition" with FreeBSD to see which one would support more computer architectures, and the list of supported such architectures was long indeed.
Yet, for some reason, it appears that those times are slowly but surely coming to an end.
The Linux kernel itself has been steadily dropping support for more and more old and obsolete computer architectures, which in many cases is understandable (particularly when their market share is completely abysmal and even that little is quickly diminishing). Also gcc, the ubiquitous compiler used mostly in Linux, has been dropping support for different processor architectures one by one. Perhaps not at the same speed as the kernel, but still.
But that's not the major problem. Many of the biggest and most important software projects for Linux, such as several of the biggest Desktop Environments, package management systems, standard command line tool suites, software building systems and so on and so forth, have been dropping support for more and more architectures and operating systems in later years.
And not just some old and obsolete systems from the 1980's. Sometimes even completely modern systems still in active use. As the latest prominent example, the KDE desktop environment system (one of the biggest and most popular ones) is dropping support for FreeBSD and several other architectures, becoming more restricted to not just Linux in general, but to specific Linux distros in particular.
The absolutely insane obsession and rush to re-implement working code in Rust is also causing diminished support for computer architectures, even many that are still supported by the Linux Kernel. (That's because there exist no Rust compilers for those architectures.)
In some cases it goes just beyond dropping and abandoning support. Sometimes, for some strange reason, some projects have become outright activists trying to literally destroy some older systems. Most infamously, the Wayland project has been very aggressively and purposefully trying to destroy and bury the older X.org project, to make it disappear from the face of Earth, never to be used again. They are deliberately boycotting and sabotaging it, and aggressively attacking anybody who dares to fork it and develop and distribute it on their own.
It's completely insane.
It feels like Linux is becoming more and more Apple-like and Microsoft-like by the day. What was once an operating system that prided itself for its wide portability and support of platforms and architectures, is becoming more and more restricted by the day.
Heck, when some Microsoft projects are more open and portable than some large Linux projects, something is very, very wrong.
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