GNOME's Mutter Drops Legacy OpenGL Driver Support

The Clutter OpenGL "Cogl" code within the GNOME Mutter compositor has removed legacy OpenGL driver support ahead of next month's GNOME 44 release.

The Cogl driver for supporting the OpenGL legacy profile has been dropped today from the Mutter code. This leaves the targets for supporting the OpenGL 3.2 core profile and newer or OpenGL ES 2.0 and newer.

The basis for removing the legacy OpenGL driver path is that even dated hardware/drivers should at least be able to support OpenGL ES 2.0 and use that driver path instead. Raised as a result of this merge request were old Intel graphics being capable of just OpenGL 2.1 but should in turn be able to use the OpenGL ES 2.0 path.

The developer belief is that the OpenGL ES 2.0 path should work at least as well as the legacy OpenGL path for the old/low-end hardware or ideally the OpenGL ES 2.0 route may be better supported in cases of ARM/embedded hardware. Removing the legacy path also leads to less testing/developer resources when testing new functionality.

More details for those interested via this merge request that was merged into Mutter a few hours ago.