Dropping support after only 25 years? I can’t believe Linux is contributing to planned obsolescence.
ATI Rage 128, 3Dfx, S3 Savage, Intel 810, SiS, VIA and Matrox MGA DRM drivers
Those are some ancient cards! Can’t believe they’re supported this long.
I still have a Rage 128 hanging around as a ‘temporary head’ for installing headless servers. Many happy nights playing Thief: The Dark Project with it, and now it’s only good for rendering a TTY at a barely acceptable resolution. And soon, not even that. Goodbye, little e-waste :-(
What do you mean obsolete. I still use 'em.
For all worrying about it I’d like to say, you can re-add driver code and compile your own kernel, and everything will be working fine, and last time I’ve read wiki there’s SLTC support for Linux 6.1 means your GPUs will be officially supported until 2033
AMD and nVidia on Windows: So your GPU is still very capable and useful for almost everything including most gaming tasks, but it’s a couple years old and not making us money any more? Sucks to be you, have fun hunting for unmaintained legacy drivers with likely security holes from questionable sources.
Linux: Your video card is from a long bygone era of computing, before the term “GPU” was a thing, and basically a museum piece by now? We’ll maintain a long-term support version for you for the next ten years.
Damn I’m old. I had at least two of those cards
I’ve been using (or, in some cases, trying to use) that when it was brand new. Kernel side was relatively easy - but there was a lot of compiling custom versions of XFree86 trying to get acceleration working properly.
On the one hand a bit sad to see that kind of history I’ve experienced myself go - on the other hand, it’s probably been a decade since I’ve last used something without KMS, and the ease of use of modern KMS drivers is way ahead of all the older stuff.
I’ve had a system in the late 90s with a 3dfx voodoo card. Also had a laptop with a SIS card from the early 2000 era.
The voodoo card was THE card to have it it’s day (mine was an older second hand system though). The SIS card… for some reason they decided that standard VESA mode probing wasn’t a thing they supported and would hardware crash when that API was used. I eventually got it working in Linux after patching xfree86 to not attempt probing when loading the VESA driver.
I think I remember running into that as well but for whatever reason I couldn’t get accelerated-x working with the opengl libraries I was using for school. Likely the issue was just a lack of understanding on my part as I don’t think I had a good grasp of the Linux library loader until well after I graduated.
