[tracker1]

I'm not suggesting they keep it all... just ironic as a statement considering Linux is literally removing a bit lately... <= 486, the bus drivers for mice, etc.

I'm mostly okay cleaning out a lot of legacy and unsupported devices. In some ways, and for people who want to support really old hardware it may not be great, but they're most likely stuck on older versions for other reasons.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I don't think it is ironic, though; Linux isn't "Dropping support for things just because they are old", it's dropping unused things when they cause code quality problems. That's rather different than features being dropped because the vendor doesn't want to bother supporting them even though they still worked and have active users.

[gzread]

Feetures being dropped because nobody wants to support them is a prominent feature of free software. That's part of "no warranty". If it does bother you, you're supposed to step up to support it yourself, or pay someone to.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Okay, but that's the exact opposite of what we're discussing here? Linux, which is free software, isn't dropping features because nobody wants to support them, but because nobody's using them. Meanwhile, macOS, developed as a commercial product and with a much weaker showing of open source or even source availability, is dropping features because Apple doesn't want to support them.

[dwaite]

> Linux, which is free software, isn't dropping features because nobody wants to support them, but because nobody's using them.

I disagree. They are dropping support because nobody is maintaining them. There may very well be people still using these features, but they haven't been motivated or aren't properly skilled to offer to maintain them going forward, and haven't motivated some other skilled person via payments.

Rather, the core difference is that Apple does not offer a way to have external people take over providing support.

[nine_k]

If anybody would care to keep these drivers up, it would be easy to revive them as kernel modules. It's not that Linux is going to lose an upstream interface to publish events from a bus mouse.

Support for 486 is another thing, but, frankly speaking, running a modern Linux kernel on a 486 makes no sense, either form a practical or preservationist / museum perspective.

[ryandrake]

Absolutely--Linux is by no means perfect.

[esseph]

What is the age of the 486SX code vs the code paths Apple is removing right now?