There are several things here that are different cases. The key factor is that without a maintainer, code can stop working. In addition, the maintainer of hardware support needs to have access to the hardware to do testing. Support for old packages: If nobody steps forward to maintain a package, it can stop working. For example, new compilers can enforce rules that were previously unenforced. New compiler optimizations can cause latent bugs to manifest themselves. Another example: things used by a package can change. The package may need to be updated to reflect that change. Similarly, there has been an increasing focus on security. Lots of old code was a bit careless and people have found ways to exploit this. Code that is security-critical needs to be reviewed. So stale packages look like a hazard. Any distro should kick out a package that has no maintainer. How else can quality standards be maintained? A temporary gap is probably OK. Support for old hardware: I see this as two cases: support for once-common hardware that is so old as to have few users, and support for rare and quirky hardware. And there are two parts to it: should the Linux kernel support this old hardware and should a particular distro enable this kernel support. And there are two scales: the architecture scale and the device scale. Once in a while, the kernel developers change internal interfaces that device drivers use. Sometimes the driver maintainers have to update the driver to reflect this change. Without a maintainer, the driver may cease to work. This freedom to change internal interfaces has allowed the kernel to improve over the years. Examples: - Intel's Itanium architecture is no longer supported by the Linux kernel. Supporting a whole architecture puts a burden on the rest of the kernel. The kernel devs decided that the burden was more than the benefit. (I have an Itanium box but haven't turned it on in a decade.) - Some stylus hardware support has been removed from libinput. I have a ThinkPad x61 tablet with a stylus that works in Fedora 20 but when I tried Fedora 43, the stylus didn't work. Clearly not enough people cared. - 32-bit x86 support still exists in the kernel but fewer distros are bothering to provide this. Funny case: I have a number of cheap x86 machines that have 32-bit UEFI but 64-bit processors. Those can run 64-bit Linux but not 64-bit Windows. Difference between Windows and Linux support: - With open source, anyone can step forward to become a maintainer - With closed source, support can be turned off when the maintainer finds it advantageous. For example, when they want to force you to buy a new device. - Windows tries to keep a stable ABI for drivers so drivers can work without updates for many years.
From: Karen Lewellen via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
There have been a couple of interesting discussions on the Debian list lately around the distribution. One asks about the amount of orphaned packages still kept in the distro. The other though? Has to do with something I have always felt was a Linux basic assurance. It has to do with hardware being recognized by the distribution, no matter the age. In the latter case the posting person listed some details outlining errors they were getting. Still, it has me wondering if custom is truly custom? If I say wanted to install Debian on an older apple laptop, how successful would the effort be in general?
Kare