[Laforet]

Linux would also require drivers to be recompiled for a new kernel. This is not an option for most proprietary drivers for products long abandoned by the manufacturer.

For the more common and popular hardware there is a good chance that open source drivers can be maintained by the community but if your laptop relies on a somewhat obscure chipset or microcontroller then your mileage will vary...a lot. Look up "Intel GMA500 Linux driver" if you need an example of the pain.

Sometimes the decision could be entirely commercial. Most notably, OSX dropped support for all nVidia GPUs from Mojave onwards despite nVidia going on record saying they are happy to continue providing drivers but Apple won't sign them.

[my123]

> Most notably, OSX dropped support for all nVidia GPUs from Mojave onwards

Not those shipped with Macs. The GeForce kexts to support the NVIDIA GPU gens that Apple shipped, Fermi and Kepler, are still present even on Monterey.

[Laforet]

Apparently they will not be in the stable release of Monterey though it is still possible to patch the drivers in.

https://github.com/chris1111/Geforce-Kepler-patcher

Fermi was never supported beyond High Sierra IIRC.

[my123]

Hm, your own link shows that NVDAGF100Hal.kext is present though, so something for Fermi is _probably_ possible.

TIL that support for NV cards on Monterey is gone, it definitely was there in the betas.