This is potentially going to be a bit of an odd one. I'm having hardware/driver issues and I'm currently sanity checking my decisions in order to work out where to pick my battles.
Although this concerns the latest version of Mint this is kernel/driver related and I'm posting here for thoughts and opinion. (A bad experience on their forums resulted in me deleting my account and hence I'm asking here) I'm using the latest version on an old motherboard. Gigabyte GA-890GPA. The processor is an AMD Phenom II X6. We're talking kit from 2010
The processor itself is rather nice, 3.3Ghz, 6 core, still a working and useful processor and machine overall. 14gig of Ram... not too shabby and... useful.
However, there are issues.
Firstly, I started getting some odd behaviour with the graphics card. Loading the live image off USB, with a Gigabyte Nvidea PCI-E graphics card in, I can see the BIOS screen, text is fine, but when it goes into graphical environment, it goes blank. If I use the on-board Radeon, it's fine.
However, what gave me pause for thought is that various things are going unclaimed. Chief among them, the onboard network card a Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411. So I did various readings about drivers not being in the kernel any more, etc. etc. I'm assuming that my graphics issue is most likely, likewise a bus/driver issue.
Here's where I sat down and started thinking. I could go on the journey of sorting this out, getting the drivers, patching them into the kernel, something which would then have to be repeated every time the kernel changed... or do I start installing extra cards like network cards, extra USB, etc. using chipsets which are likely to remain supported for longer, or do I just junk an otherwise useful machine and save myself the time it will take to keep it running. (I already discarded the option of running a kernel of the age required to get some of this stuff working again, on security grounds, and people were reporting issues with the Realtek drivers from, like, six year ago, so I don't want to go back that far.)
I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts on this, to help me pick my battles, because I get the feeling that this is going to be something I'm going to continue to face in the future; like my, "power laptop," is a Toshiba with an i7 on board which is now approaching ten years. Similar with some of my workstations; I won't find some of this out until an upgrade, one day, starts to see things not working any more. I feel like I'm standing at a cross roads and have a difficult decision to make.
Grateful for thoughts and insight to help me reach a conclusion.