[Feature Request] Maintain Blender 3.6 LTS branch to support Intel HD 4000 graphics

[ghost]

Hi, I'm using Blender on Intel Ivy Bridge hardware and according to the 4.0 release notes ¹ my processor is no longer supported.

Due to driver issues, support for Intel HD4000 series GPUs has been dropped.

Indeed looking through more release notes, the OpenGL minimum version has been bumped to 4.3. Ivy Bridge only supports 4.2.

There is a stalled PR ² on GitHub but it seems the author can no longer voluneer their time. In the discussion it seems while it would be nice to support multiple Blender LTS versions, according to the Flathub members it would only be feasable to support Blender stable and just the most recent Blender LTS.

Blender 3.6 LTS ³

The last LTS before the 4 series begins.
Supported until June 2025.

It looks like 4.0 will land soon ⁴. I'm sure most Flathub users are on more modern hardware, but there is a chance other users are on HD 4000 graphics.

My livelyhood depends having a working Blender on my ol arse hardware. While I do plan on upgrading to modern specs before 2025, is there a hope of getting some motion on having the latest 4.X and 3.6 LTS updated in tandem?

Footnotes

1. https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/4.0 ↩

2. https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/2956 ↩

3. https://www.blender.org/download/lts/3-6/ ↩

4. https://github.com/flathub/org.blender.Blender/pull/158 ↩

[superuser-miguel]

"My livelyhood depends having a working Blender on my ol arse hardware. While I do plan on upgrading to modern specs before 2025, is there a hope of getting some motion on having the latest 4.X and 3.6 LTS updated in tandem?"

I just saw the website and the latest 3.6.x update was October 19th. If you depend on 3.6.x why not try and build it yourself? All you need is the manifest (.json) file. If there are any further changes to 3.6.x then download that release and update your manifest with the appropriate url : & sha256 : in the sources section of the manifest. The process should not change enough to not be able to build, and this would allow for you to keep that version for as long as you want/need.

I have done this type of thing with several pieces of software over the years, and some which I consider finished software that will no longer receive updates.