Supporting Old Hardware In X Gets Brought Up Again

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Supporting Old Hardware In X Gets Brought Up Again

It's long been a topic of what parts of X.Org should be killed with fire. There's plenty of dated and obscure X.Org and Mesa drivers around for hardware that hasn't even been manufactured in years and are rarely used. At XDS Toulose and on other occasions it's been decided not to do a massive purge of all these legacy graphics drivers for Linux. Old hardware support by the X Server has once again been brought up, but this time it's about monitors...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODg1MA

[siride]

I wish Phoronix would stop reporting on every fit that Luc throws on the mailing lists.

[bulletxt]

I wish Phoronix would stop reporting on every fit that Luc throws on the mailing lists.

I understand your point of view, but please consider that most of phoronix readers don't go around the net reading mailing list...

[V!NCENT]

"I still have an old graphics card and I want less resulolution support with the latest software!"
-"Are there still apps shipped that fit in that legacy resolution?"
'Errrrr... the.... uhmmmm.... just... I want it!!!!"

Lol fail....

[siride]

I understand your point of view, but please consider that most of phoronix readers don't go around the net reading mailing list...

It doesn't matter if they do or don't. The point is that Luc's fits aren't really newsworthy in the first place.

[Smorg]

Of the arguments quoted Matthew Garrett's trumps all others if it's true that the policy towards both monitors and other hardware of the same vintage would be inconsistent. It makes little sense to compromise good defaults for the majority in order to cater to a few legacy corner cases - depending of course on the details of the Xorg internals being affected.

[TemplarGR]

"I still have an old graphics card and I want less resulolution support with the latest software!"
-"Are there still apps shipped that fit in that legacy resolution?"
'Errrrr... the.... uhmmmm.... just... I want it!!!!"

Lol fail....

LOL

This is what i thought too.

I believe that support for every piece of hardware older than 8(or at least 10) years should be dropped completely.

I know that for some this may seem "unfair", but it isn't. If your hardware is that old, you should probably use an older distro. We are preparing to enter year 2011 now. We have a modern KDE desktop, and GNOME is going to advance too. Apps are becoming more demanding etc. Do you really need an up to date distro for that PII 450mhz with 64mb ram and TNT GPU?

Use an older distro, you won't be missing much, and you won't place the burden of your support to the majority of users and developers.

[plonoma]

I think all of this is rather strange.

Don't most monitor connections also have a way to probe for some parameters of the monitor they are connected to?

What about x.org on smartphones and other low screen resolution devices?

Having a very low resolution with a warning message will be much more useful then this behaviour.

[TwistedLincoln]

This is very sad. While I don't use hardware that old anymore, there's little to no reason to assume that NO ONE will. Typically, first time GNU/Linux users are trying it out for the first time on a second, older machine that they have lying around. To ask them to edit their xorg.conf file just to get a graphical environment working is insane, and will drive them right back to Windows.

[elanthis]

I think all of this is rather strange.

Don't most monitor connections also have a way to probe for some parameters of the monitor they are connected to?

Particularly old ones did not, and this feature is also a bit inconsistent at times. It's not at all uncommon to get a monitor with a broken EDID specification that tells Xorg lies.

What about x.org on smartphones and other low screen resolution devices?

What about them? If you read this article, it's merely about the default setting for monitors that aren't being auto-detected properly. A working monitor or a system with an Xorg.conf override will work on any resolution just like it has before.