Any advice on improving someone's experience with GNU/Linux that starts with
"buy a new computer" is *not* helpful! Some of us don't have the privilege of
being able to afford new hardware, and we have to work with whatever hardware
we can beg, borrow, or buy second-hand.
Ten years ago I could play reasonable games on a Compaq Pentium laptop with a
3GB hard drive, running Windows 98. 30 years ago, I played perfectly
enjoyable games on a Commodore 64, with 64KB of RAM! Sure, those games
weren't trying to be Halo, but they did run reliably (usually ;), and on
hardware with a fraction of the computing power that even my 5 year old
"netbook" has onboard.
Free code gaming, like free code GUI in general, doesn't need to follow the
Windows bloatware model of demanding more and more powerful hardware with
every version. Sure, there is a demand for a line of development catering to
people with brand new 64-bit multi-cores, and RAM that's bigger than that old
Compaq hard drive. But the vast majority of users have older/ cheaper
hardware, and we need GUIs and games that we can run without crashing our
PCs, or putting up with frustrating freezing and lag.
Hopefully, sooner rather than later, hardware manufacturers will start being
more environmentally responsible and making devices that last, and can be
repaired and kept running for decades. Free code software development can
prepare for this, and encourage it, by aiming to support every piece of
hardware that still physically works, regardless of how old, or limited.
