Comment 19 for bug 1727356

Great to see you're into supporting "old" hardware. I'm pretty sure the times when people bought new hardware every other year are long gone. This G33 PC is a Core2Duo 2.1 GHz and it's perfectly up to speed for all the daily tasks, including software development.

"Older" hardware also comes with advantages. Just try to get something like CoreBoot running on recent hardware - it won't work. There's a reason why many hackers still use IBM ThinkPads.

And then there's the observation that newer hardware isn't all high end. Instead of faster and faster hardware, newer trends go into smaller form factors and shared hardware. Think of MiniITX boards, Raspberry Pis, BeagleBones or virtual machines. They do what they're expected to do and some have no OpenGL at all. Certainly they should be able to run Ubuntu. Xorg is expected to go away, so Wayland bugs have to be fixed sooner or later.

Back to the bug: having more capable hardware might even be an advantage for solving this bug. If OpenGL features shaders, one can turn this feature off, but one can't turn it on on hardware not featuring shaders. ... and I'm not too sure about the last one. Mesa has software renderers.

I've searched for the error messages logged:

$ grep -rn 'linking with uncompiled shader' /usr
Binary file /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/dri/r200_dri.so matches
Binary file /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/dri/nouveau_vieux_dri.so matches
...

13 of 18 drivers existing in each, i386 and x86_64, match, including i915 and i965.

I've looked into gnome-shell sources. To my surprise I found not kind of a traditional application there, but lots of CSS and JavaScript. Not too bad, I'm fairly good at web development.

Next plan is to remove all code which mentions 'shader' in the C sources and see whether this makes the error messages going away.

And if somebody happens to know whether this JS stuff can use shaders, too, please let me know.