It looks as if I'm not the only one who's a little concerned about the way Linux is heading. I'm principally concerned with its progressive loss of support for older equipment, even as I understand (I think) maintainers' reluctance to expend effort on what they see as obsolete gadgets.

Igor Ljubuncic ("dedoimedo") writes regularly about his testing of new distros, and he seems to find an increasing number of problems and regressions. Perhaps the pace of progress is being forced artificially, and developers might usefully slow down a little. More here:

http://www.ocsmag.com/2016/07/13/linux-2017-the-road-to-hell/

A couple of extracts:

One, old problems are rarely if ever fixed, especially hardware-related problems...

The other part is, the distroscape is accelerating. There are more and more changes being added to the desktop, and as a whole, the desktop is becoming more complex. The typical cycle of about six months might have been sufficient to review and QA the distributions, but it no longer applies for the modern crop of systems. I believe that it has become too difficult to keep pace with the rate of change and provide high-quality results.

The answer is simple. Slow down...let’s trying slowing down to one release a year. That gives everyone twice as much time to focus on fixing problems and creating beautiful, elegant distributions with the passion and love they have, and the passion and love and loyalty that their users deserve. Free does not mean you can toss the emotions down the bin.

I believe that Microsoft's behaviour at the moment makes it especially important for people to have an alternative. Not everybody can afford Macs, neither do they necessarily want to be afflicted with yet more proprietary software. I just hope those stars who maintain the various distros keep us lesser mortals in mind, and cater to our less exotic needs (and even to our ancient equipment.)