[Bf-committers] Minimal Blender specs - 5 year old systems & OS

[Knapp]

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 12:31 PM, Ton Roosendaal <ton at blender.org> wrote:
> Hi Chad,
>
> I don't think this response justifies the careful and positive way everyone who works on Blender is handling this topic. But I realize it might not be well visible whether people who talk here are also contributing to Blender though.
>
> Knowing all of the active devs here quite well, I can only ensure you they're all very responsible, and proud to contribute to a program that runs on nearly everything.
>
> But we have to cope with open source dynamics, which depends on the singular fact that nothing happens without people contributing to it. That's democratic & fair.
>
> For non-developers this 5 year guideline might seem arbitrary or unclear, but for everyone who's been working - especially on support and bugs - it's a growing frustration that we can't help people anymore using old hardware or OSes.
>
> Also... developers and users also want the best product possible, utilizing current hardware and OS developments. To balance this I proposed this guideline, which still offers a far better platform support you'd get from any commercial 3d software. Maya wouldn't even be supported 5 years ago on systems we still do!
>
> At some moment people who are stuck in the past with hardware, also need to accept they cannot get new software for it either. We will do our very best here, but in cases where support is really impossible we can use the proposed guideline to define what to do.
>
> Also note that effectively, for OSX our support level is less than 4 years now. This is due to the fact Apple makes OSX upgrades available very cheap, so nearly everyone's been switching to newer versions.
>
> -Ton-

+1!

Also I would like to point out that anyone stuck with an old XP
computer can install Linux as a dual boot system (some are REALLY
small so HD space is not a problem) and then use the newer Blender
versions provided the hardware is supported.

-- 
Douglas E Knapp

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