GNOME MUTTER will stop support of old OpenGL versions

to the code base of the Mutter composite server, which will be used in the GNOME 44 release, entered Removing Support for the old versions of Opengl. For the work of MUTTER, drivers with support for at least OpenGL 3.1 will need. At the same time, the OpenGL ES 2.0 support will be preserved in MUTTER, which will maintain the ability to work on old video cards and on the GPU used on ARM boards. It is assumed that removal of the code to support outdated versions of OpenGL simplifies the maintenance of the code base and will release resources when testing new functionality.

In Mesa, almost all the current Drivers of Opengl satisfy the stated conditions (support for Opengl 3.1 is not fully implemented in the drivers Etnaviv (Vivante), VC4 (VideoCore Raspberry Pi), V3D (Videocore Raspberry Pi), Asahi (Apple Silicon) and Lima (Mali 400/450)). It is assumed that old GPU and ARM systems, for which drivers do not provide support for the necessary versions of OpenGL, can be used, so through switching to the use of OpenGL ES 2.0. For example, old Drivers for the GPU Intel Gen3-Gen5, supporting only OpenGL 2.1, will be able to be used, as they also have access to OpenGL ES 2.0.

/Media reports cited above.