Re: [orca-list] Ubuntu 12.10 and beyond, Unity 2D will no longer be maintained.

[Luke Yelavich <luke yelavich canonical com>]

On Wed, May 09, 2012 at 03:09:25PM PDT, bando?ers wrote:
> So, while I agree that there's no great need for most people to use the transitional, (between LTS), 
> releases, but am left with a question.
> Does this mean that those who don't have 3d graphics support will be forever restricted to precise and 
> back? 
> Again I don't see this as much of an issue for people now that LTS releases will be supported for 5years, 
> and of course hardware is aging as am I. I just want to make sure I understand.

How old is the hardware you are currently using? Chances are that you indeed do have graphics hardware that 
has 3D graphics support, and you haven't needed to set it up, i.e you have an NVIDIA card that is not capable 
of rendering 3D graphics without installing the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. There are some edge cases for 
specific hardware released in the last 10 years like a handfull of netbooks, but modern Linux desktop shells 
are doing their best to support 3D graphics hardware that is 8-9 years old. See my recent email about desktop 
shells and their graphical requirements for more information.

If you are still using hardware that is more than 9 years old, then yes you will need to upgrade, unless you 
switch to XFCE or LXDE, as chances are your CPu won't be fast enough to render any desktop at a sufficient 
speed to be usable.

Luke