Ironic, considering Linux is dropping a LOT of old devices from 7.1
It's my understanding that those are (mostly?) devices where they legitimately have reason to believe there are zero users. In particular, there's a pattern where someone will discover that Linux has a driver that hasn't actually worked for a long time, and nobody's complained, so then they remove it.
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.
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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.
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