On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 6:16 AM, BRM<bm_witn...@yahoo.com> wrote: <SNIP> > > I have to agree with Duncan on this one. (not that that's a bad thing - I've > really enjoyed his insights on this thread.)
As do I. > > Not everyone upgrades their video card every 6 months. > Most probably get a video card upgrade only when they buy a new computer; > and most don't buy a new computer every other year either, probably more like > 4 years or so. > > I typically buy a new computer about every 8 years; and most people I know > are probably between 4 and 8 years. > > So yes, KDE4 must be able to handle older hardware as Duncan describes. > > Glad you have the cash to burn on more frequent updates, but you're in the > minority of computer users in general. > > One of the things I love about gentoo is using my older hardware - my server > running gentoo (and hosting portage for my internal network) is a PII 233 > from 1997. > My gentoo laptop is a Pentium M from 2003; and my desktop is an AMD64 from > 2005; both run KDE3 and will be running KDE4 in time - just waiting for > Gentoo to mark stable on respective architectures as I don't want to play > with testing on these systems at that kind of level. > > And I'm sure there are plenty of users in the same boat as me. I may be a > computer enthusiast, but I don't have cash to burn on "frequenty" hardware > upgrades. I make the hardware I have last as long as I can - I just retired a > P90 Slackware-base server last spring, but then only b/c the hard drive (from > 1997) died due to the system being placed badly the truck during a move. > > Ben We need better tools for creating and maintaining personal overlays. Here is my story. Support for old hardware has been one of the downfalls of the devs deciding to not keep everything in portage but rather they start weeding out software before we users have really finished using it. I have 4 Asus Pundit-R machines which use an ATI chipset with intergrated graphics. They are low profile machines and you cannot just buy a new graphics controller for them. I use these machines as MythTV frontends. (2 at my house, 2 at my parents) The machine has S-Video outputs which drive most of our TVs and leave other inputs free. At the time I bought the machines the Open Source radeon driver didn't support S-Video so I had to use the ATI driver which worked fine. A couple of years ago ATI, in all wisdom, dropped TV Out support for this specific chipset from their closed source driver so I was forced to stick with the driver that was current at that time. This was OK for awhile as it was in portage and I could just mask higher revisions. However after awhile it turned out kernel updates forced incompatibilities between new kernels and this old driver so I was forced to mask newer revisions than the last one that worked with the last radeon driver that worked. 3 months go by and portage maintainers decide to start weeding 'old' software out and, you guessed it, they weeded out what I needed to run this hardware. The ATI driver was gone. The kernel was gone. No discussions, no announcements. It was just gone. A machine I could build and run using a Gentoo 2006 install CD could no longer be built and run using a 2008 CD. Then I'm forced to learn about attics, building overlays, etc. It was a mess for a long time. Recently the Open Source driver has started to support TVOut on this version of the Radeon hardware, so I'm now back to using Open Source, but video quality is FAR inferior to the ATI driver, although CPU usage is far superior so at least with OS I have a quiet machine while watching a bad picture. Moral of the story - don't trust portage to support your machine tomorrow just because it works today, and don't expect portage maintainers to care. The response you'll get, if you get one at all, is 'be a man, create your own overlay, be responsible for your machine, and shut up'. >From experience, Mark
