Comment 93 for bug 304871

> Ubuntu seems to be well on the path of "latest, high end equipment only" which is the way Microsoft goes.

Please, that is hardly a fair statement to make.

The purpose for putting out new Ubuntu releases is *primarily* to provide users with easy access to the latest code from upstream. If upstream chooses to drop support for some old piece of hardware, there is often little we can do about it at the distro level; if it's something our OEMs care about or that has a ton of users, Canonical may be able to justify investing resources there, but that is rarely the case with legacy graphics hardware. If an older release works, stick with it.

Ultimately, part of the reason we all want to see hardware vendors putting out their drivers as open source instead of proprietary, is so that when the company decides to cut off support for a chip, at least the community has the option to provide support for it themselves. We're in that situation now for i815 and i825; it stands to reason eventually we'll be there with i845 too.

I don't like seeing support for old Intel chips deteriorate any more than owners of the chip do, but I think at some point the only way we're going to keep up support on the old chips is if some community heroes step up to the plate and take a swing at it themselves. The good news is that with -intel, most of the code is already there, and experts are easily at hand for advice and guidance; if you have the hardware, ample free time, and know a little C coding, you can do it.