This is great news tempered by the fact that this is the first version since the NaN buyout that I'll not be able to run without buying new hardware. I saw many similar lamentations in the various fora, usually met with "It's 2019 etc etc." And so it goes.
They already bent over backwards working around bugs in drivers the GPU vendors abandoned years ago to support 10 year old NVIDIA hardware, 7 year old AMD hardware, and 5 year old Intel hardware. And it still works on hardware older than that (at least on Linux) in spite of not being "supported". I don't know what else people are expecting them to do.
It's free software and it's the best there is. Even a commercial software package that you'd pay 100's of dollars for would be worse in the compatibility dimension that the poster is lamenting.
It's actually much worse. I use SolidWorks (parametric 3D solid modeler for mechanical design) and my company pays around $4k per seat, and it requires you to use a specific SolidWorks-certified GPU driver, which means you are forever stuck with whatever bugs that version has. It's an awful situation. My last laptop (Dell Precision M4800) had graphics issues with docking and undocking and sleeping and waking, but I couldn't update the GPU driver because it would break solidworks. Fun!
They bumped the OpenGL version up to 3.4 (or something) which means older hardware can't run it anymore--one of the main reasons I had to give up my Junior Woodchuck Blender Hacker hobby since I can't afford new hardware...
They bumped the OpenGL version to 3.3 which is 9 years old. I don't know exactly what hardware you have but there's some that supports newer GL versions on Linux vs Windows, i.e the integrated GPU in Sandy Bridge hardware only goes up to 3.1 in the Windows driver but the Linux driver supports 3.3. AMD Linux drivers support 3.3 all the way back to HD2000 hardware from 2007.
1) You probably need just a budget but contemporary graphics card, under $100, to improve your computer from implausibly old (and therefore unsupported) to very cheap (but good enough for Blender), raising the question of what light computer usage has allowed you to postpone this and other upgrades for years.
2) You want to use vintage equipment lying around, not a "normal" computer, raising the question of whether you are interested in practical use or in attempting stunts.
Stunts? A curiously personal attack. I was merely saying that this was the first time Blender did not run on any of the machines I happened to have lying around as it so admirably has done for years. I was not saying the change in requirements was wrong. And I will of course continue using 2.79 until the smoke comes out of my computer. I don't make a habit of throwing away otherwise functional computers, and if I was a dedicated enthusiast instead of a dabbler, yes I'd have sent dozens of computers and GPUs to landfill by now. To each their own.
