It's not quite heat on spacebar, but it's certainly reached the realm of 'support it yourself you muppets'. Not like Debian stops you from installing your own drivers from wherever you want.
It's not quite heat on spacebar, but it's certainly reached the realm of 'support it yourself you muppets'. Not like Debian stops you from installing your own drivers from wherever you want.
Its entirely possible that there are people who use Debian because of cost and ease of use on old hardware due to cost and ease of use. Unfortunately for them, they're also probably not a...
Its entirely possible that there are people who use Debian because of cost and ease of use on old hardware due to cost and ease of use. Unfortunately for them, they're also probably not a significant enough of the userbase to warrant the maintenance overhead.
The one use case I can think of is people still using super old hardware like this for industrial control systems, etc. Have heard stories about huge, expensive machines in science labs or...
The one use case I can think of is people still using super old hardware like this for industrial control systems, etc. Have heard stories about huge, expensive machines in science labs or industrial settings running their control applications on ancient hardware and software. Although, not sure why such systems would need updates to newer Debian, they're probably still running ancient OS versions, too.
Emphasis added: Those packages are still available in the current Debian stable (Buster), which does not end-of-life until 2022. For example, here is one of the removed packages, still available....
Emphasis added:
We believe that the bug you reported is now fixed; the following package(s) have been removed from unstable
Those packages are still available in the current Debian stable (Buster), which does not end-of-life until 2022. For example, here is one of the removed packages, still available. It's only gone if you switch to unstable (sid) in the upper right. And it's not even gone gone, it's still available as unofficial builds via debports.
So if you're using this old hardware on Debian, it continues to work, and will for at least the next 2 years.
This is a completely reasonable removal by Debian, with a generous time frame to find alternatives.
It's not quite heat on spacebar, but it's certainly reached the realm of 'support it yourself you muppets'. Not like Debian stops you from installing your own drivers from wherever you want.
That was my thought, surely if you're persisting with hardware this old on Debian you're fairly computer literate and can build them from source.
Its entirely possible that there are people who use Debian because of cost and ease of use on old hardware due to cost and ease of use. Unfortunately for them, they're also probably not a significant enough of the userbase to warrant the maintenance overhead.
This old hardware is outclassed by a Raspberry Pi 4, so upgrading to something that has support isn't exactly expensive.
The one use case I can think of is people still using super old hardware like this for industrial control systems, etc. Have heard stories about huge, expensive machines in science labs or industrial settings running their control applications on ancient hardware and software. Although, not sure why such systems would need updates to newer Debian, they're probably still running ancient OS versions, too.
Shouldn't the generic VESA drivers still work? It's not like you'd be getting much performance out of a Rage 128 these days anyway.
Presumably that Rage 128 is paired with a CPU that needs hardware acceleration to provide a reasonably fast GUI experience.
Emphasis added:
Those packages are still available in the current Debian stable (Buster), which does not end-of-life until 2022. For example, here is one of the removed packages, still available. It's only gone if you switch to unstable (sid) in the upper right. And it's not even gone gone, it's still available as unofficial builds via debports.
So if you're using this old hardware on Debian, it continues to work, and will for at least the next 2 years.
This is a completely reasonable removal by Debian, with a generous time frame to find alternatives.
Are people really still using a G3 or G4? That’s wild to me.