AMD GPUs are famous for working very well on Linux. However, what about the very first GCN GPUs? Are they working as well as the new ones? In this post, I’m going to summarize how well these old GPUs are supported and what I’ve been doing to improve them.
The flip side is if your hardware is too old or obscure, there’s nobody with a financial incentive to keep it going. (That said, this can also happen in pure for-profit development)
That happens more frequently in closed source than in open source.
I’ve had to dig through shady sites to download drivers for printers or scanners that are perfectly fine but the manufacturer decided not to support the latest Windows versions. The manufacturer wants you to buy a new printer, there’s little incentive to support old hardware.
Meanwhile my ancient Laserjet 1100 works out of the box in any Linux.
Otoh, the old Windows driver still works perfectly fine on modern Windows while there just never was a Linux driver for my obscure Elan touchpad, so I can’t even source an old driver.
Recently I revived an old x86 netbook to see what I can still do with it when I put Linux on it and was negatively surprised how dead the 32-bit Linux experience is. Most distros are dropping 32bit now, with only some purpose-made old-device distros like Antix still supporting it, but also most apps have dropped 32bit years ago.
And while 32bit is old, it’s not exactly obscure.
Windows Vista being the widest known example, basically the KT Boundary of computer drivers.
Brother Laser Printer I found at good will for 5 bucks worked right out of the box, too. I’ve still yet to put a toner cartridge in it, lol.