On Sun, Nov 25, 2018 at 06:28:45AM +0100, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: > ]] Adam Borowski > > > Tested on an early bronze age i386 box with an "82915G/GV/910GL"; both > > glxgears and es2gears_x11 work fine. I don't think anyone is going to run a > > modern desktop environment on a machine older than that. > > > > But that's an Intel card -- with nVidia, stuff 3 years old gets dropped from > > the official drivers while 2 years old doesn't get Linux support yet -- and > > nouveau has problems on its own. > > es2gears_x11 works fine on my GF116 board (release date: 2011-03-15) > using the proprietary drivers (on an otherwise testing system).
That's because our Debian maintainers are not hasty at packaging new drivers with such "improvements". The support for your card's generation and the next (400 and 500) is long since dropped in nVidia's mainline. A glance at upstream's site discouraged me from searching for information when _they_ dropped it, but in Debian, the droppage reached experimental in April 2018. So -- my figure of 3 years was exaggerated, but so is your defense. I guess the Debian packages will once again fork the old drivers, but at least upstream security support for them ends Jan 2019, which for something that requires a kernel driver is deeply troubling. And, it means no porting to new kernels -- nearly at all, as opposed to supported cards being "only" 0-3 months behind a stable release. So sorry, that's simply not an option for a good part of us. As for nouveau, you don't know if it actually works adequately for your card until you buy it. Thus, Linus' message was neither strong nor expressive enough. Meow! -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢰⠒⠀⣿⡁ Imagine there are bandits in your house, your kid is bleeding out, ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ the house is on fire, and seven big-ass trumpets are playing in the ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ sky. Your cat demands food. The priority should be obvious...
