Here are 3 concrete examples of everyday tools with special abilities only feasibly installed natively on old linux distros. 1: I use text to speech a lot. For

Here are 3 concrete examples of everyday tools with special abilities only feasibly installed natively on old linux distros. 1: I use text to speech a lot. For the last 20 years I've use Festival text to speech on linux. Specifically I've used Festival 1.96 because it has support for the best sounding voices, the enhanced Nitech HTS voices. No other voice set, not CMU arctic or any other, sounds as good. Modern distros don't package 1.96 and I can never get it to compile. Nitech HTS don't work in Festival 2.0. There's no other mature local linux text to speech software that sounds decent. Every time I build a new computer I both survey the Festival 2.x voice sets and other linux TTS software, including any new weird stuff (like google tachotron, etc). I've never been able to replicate the functionality of my old linux install (or get Festival 1.96 compiled on a newer distro). I really would like the same functionality on a newer distro and I spend a lot of time searching and trying. So if you know an answer to this I'd love to hear about it (anyone). 2: It might be possible for me to get GNU Radio 3.6.5 installed on a newer distro but I laugh at the idea of getting all the out of tree modules from that era to compile on a modern distro. It's the norm for GNU Radio modules to be left behind and abilities lost with every minor version. 3: The Python 2.4 software imgSeek which indexes images and allows me to do MS Paintbrush style colored sketches to search for images.