Mesa Will Not Be Dropping Its Older GPU Drivers

[grok]

Slow software rendering is still better than a broken driver that does not work at all.

Depends, running an old game at 50 fps is a lot better than 1 fps.

As for what game you might run on i915 driver (and things like nouveau, r200, r300 etc.), a rather obvious one is Warcraft III on Wine, which is also like a run time for running a famous game called Dota 1. This is/was big. Also notable for being easy to run, and running flawlessly. And if you don't want to run Steam there aren't that many other games. In fact, if you would rather avoid online accounts which is one of the draws of using linux, given that you do not much else than a handful old games (or dysfunctional skeleton games like Open Arena) what is the incentive exactly to spend $500 or $1000 on hardware upgrades?

There used to be Google Earth also that required very little performance (I heard these assholes are turning it in a web application, thus I'm using the past tense. Google Earth was faster than "modern" Google Maps. Though I think it still runs anyway)
There might be other little reasons to have OpenGL. Not so much for the desktop itself, such machines ought to run something like Mate, XFCE or LXDE which you don't usually want 3D-accelerated unless you're a compiz fan. You don't even need to run a software compositor.