I would also argue that it's harder to get a driver back than to not have it removed.

"quite an uphill battle": you have to make your case, yes -- and it can be an uphill battle occasionally *if* that can cause huge security problems for the kernel as a whole, as that it become a judgement call. But several removals were reverted over time, so from my point of view "quite an uphill battle" does not describe the situations adequately.

It also hurts those that are trying to not create e-waste when there is no reason to do so. One can argue that newer CPUs are more power efficient etc and thus upgrading is a net positive. I doubt that is true for most peripherals and things like NICs.

As I said, it sucks for everyone, I realize that.

But at ax25 and amateur/ham-radio stuff, it may worth to wait a bit for their removal, as HAMs just recently start to discover linux for their needs.... Usually their stuff is always windows based because everyone has windows..

But they get tired of microslop too .... so still having native ax25 and others ham radio related stuff might be a good thing ... at least for a while still.

Because that shows that the #Linux #kernel community, or maybe the whole FLOSS ecosystem, is doing a bad job at communicating that developers and testers need to invest at least time and maybe money to ensure things continue to work.

Which is why at some point things, at least for the #LinuxKernel with its "no regressions" policy, boil down to: "Unless somebody tests regularly (e.g., at least each new mainline version, better each new -rc1), things you care about might get broken and/or removed before it becomes hard or impossible to fix that".

If a hardware is very widespread, there is a decent chance that somebody else will do that testing[1]; but over time you might need to become that "somebody" to prevent a unhappy outcome for yourself and others.

[1] but hardware is tricky and has many warts that show up only in special environments. Maybe yours is one of those, so you might want to help with testing nevertheless. Which is a good way to give back to FLOSS.