A while back there was some debate about the Linux kernel dropping support for some very old GPUs. (I can’t remember the exact models, but they were roughly from the late 90’s)
It spurred a lot of discussion on how many years of hardware support is reasonable to expect.
I would like to hear y’alls views on this. What do you think is reasonable?
The fact that some people were mad that their 25 year old GPU wouldn’t be officially supported by the latest Linux kernel seemed pretty silly to me. At that point, the machine is a vintage piece of tech history. Valuable in its own right, and very cool to keep alive, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the devs to drop it after two and a half decades.
I think for me, a 10 year minimum seems reasonable.
And obviously, much of this work is for little to no pay, so love and gratitude to all the devs that help keep this incredible community and ecosystem alive!
And don’t forget to Pay for your free software!!!
My current laptop is 9 years old, I recently replaced the heat paste and added new RAM. It should definitely be more than 10 years, as my laptop is totally usable for everyday tasks like
My current laptop is 7 years old, and I Love It!
I still even play games with it. Not the newest stuff, but I have such a huge backlog of indies and not-so-new games that I could play for 15 years…
If someone told me this will be garbage in 3 years… I would hit them with the laptop. It’s a T470p, their skull is the part that would break.