Supporting Old Hardware In X Gets Brought Up Again

I think that one of the reasons Gnu/Linux is popular is because of the broad hardware support. It's a shame that modernity is suddenly driving development (at least for some).

I'm no expert, but it seems that instead of turning display driver development toward the new and away from the old hardware, why not just fork the drivers and keep the old versions for old hardware and use the new fork to better serve the new hardware. Nvidia seems to have more than one driver, why not Intel and ATI?

Unfortunately, I inherited 3 machines with intel "Brookdale" graphics integrated on the motherboard. Current Xorg doesn't support these at all well: anywere between 20 seconds and 20 minutes of use causes a bizarre display lock-up that's incurable except by rebooting.

I have informally "forked" by going back to Slackware 11 on one of these machines, and by marking the Xorg packages "not updateable" in pacman.conf on my Arch machine.

Support of old hardware is important, but you can always go back to earlier revs and with a little elbow grease, have a modern experience.

Many of us will probably have to look into keeping older packages around and preventing the package-management software from updating them.