[JonChesterfield]

Your stance is:

    1/ Old hardware is free to support because the software for it just keeps working

    2/ Lazy Linux people didn't test the software that stopped working on old hardware

Those two things you believe to be true are inconsistent with one another. For example, in this context.

What you're missing is that code changes to do new stuff and sometimes those changes are incompatible with old hardware or operating systems. If noone is testing said old systems and the developer doesn't remember said eccentricities, the old systems will break when the new stuff lands.

If anything it might be better to spend the resources deleting the support for old hardware (probably at the point where people stop testing on it) so that people using the old stuff get a much clearer message that they also need to use old tools with it. It's hard to get sign off to do that either, leaving the probably broken stuff lying around is the spend-no-time-now choice.

[johnklos]

You're generalizing, and doing so with poor assumptions. Supporting old hardware isn't about cost. If one wanted to compare the cost of simply maintaining code with the cost of adding features, supporting new hardware, and so on, it'd be hard to even measure maintenance.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation should be running two Pis of every kind with the newest version of their official OS and the next older one, running automated tests. This isn't hard, nor is it time consuming after it's set up.

The real issue is that people change things in ways that affect older hardware, which is fine, but they should test those changes. If they don't want to, they shouldn't be making those changes. Period.