Comment 155 for bug 284408

this is tough and problematic and we were very lucky to have 8.04(LTS) 3D accelerated fglrx working. But it means we can't get updated software via Ubuntu and can only run what's already in the repo. It means that if you require 3D acceleration, you/we are stuck on 8.04 forever. The way it seems is the cause is because ATI/AMD stopped supporting some popular graphics chips and that means they not only stopped adding fixes but they stopped bringing the existing driver forward to new X11 server versions. Combine that with Canonical moving quite fast with updates and moving X11 forward and you have orphaned users who have to stay out of date or abandon good hardware and purchase new hardware which is currently supported. Desktop users can just throw out a card, laptop users must throw out the entire computer.

This is not good and with 10s of millions of Linux users and the number growing quickly, this is going to be a much larger problem. Isn't there a way to bring older versions of X forward to help ease the pain or are kernel ties also problematic?