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Comment by tracker1

19 hours ago

I'm not suggesting they keep it all... just ironic as a statement considering Linux is literally removing a bit lately... <= 486, the bus drivers for mice, etc.

I'm mostly okay cleaning out a lot of legacy and unsupported devices. In some ways, and for people who want to support really old hardware it may not be great, but they're most likely stuck on older versions for other reasons.

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tracker1

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yjftsjthsd-h  18 hours ago

I don't think it is ironic, though; Linux isn't "Dropping support for things just because they are old", it's dropping unused things when they cause code quality problems. That's rather different than features being dropped because the vendor doesn't want to bother supporting them even though they still worked and have active users.

  • gzread  13 hours ago

    Feetures being dropped because nobody wants to support them is a prominent feature of free software. That's part of "no warranty". If it does bother you, you're supposed to step up to support it yourself, or pay someone to.

    • yjftsjthsd-h  13 hours ago

      Okay, but that's the exact opposite of what we're discussing here? Linux, which is free software, isn't dropping features because nobody wants to support them, but because nobody's using them. Meanwhile, macOS, developed as a commercial product and with a much weaker showing of open source or even source availability, is dropping features because Apple doesn't want to support them.

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nine_k  17 hours ago

If anybody would care to keep these drivers up, it would be easy to revive them as kernel modules. It's not that Linux is going to lose an upstream interface to publish events from a bus mouse.

Support for 486 is another thing, but, frankly speaking, running a modern Linux kernel on a 486 makes no sense, either form a practical or preservationist / museum perspective.