HI, i'm going to start learning opengl with freeglut. The thing is, I don't know what version to use, I've made some research and it seems that opengl 2.1 would give me the most portability and would be compatible with old hardware. But I also found that in opengl 3 a lot of things from older versions are deprecated. I don't want to make an app wih some outdated software, but my graphics card supports opengl 3.0 and all the tutorials I found are for opengl 3.3 or greater.

Which version do you recommend me? Is opengl 2.1 a good option if I want compatibility with old hardware? Or it's just to old?

Any tutorials are also apreciated

Plus given that shader-based graphics is always getting larger, it's probably best to get learning that!

Actually i know nothing about graphics with opengl but I've heard that with opengl 3 you have to write your own shaders. What about that, is it that difficult? Are there any alternatives to doing that?

I've heard that with opengl 3 you have to write your own shaders. What about that, is it that difficult? Are there any alternatives to doing that?

EDIT: Text editor should eat a bag of dicks for messing the quote blocks AND adding whitespace out of nowhere.

Whats your graphics card?

On board, intel hd graphics ivy bridge(with intel celero g1610)

Thing is, do you want learn to do cool stuff or not?

Absolutely. But I'm kinda intimidated because I'm in highschool so I don't know a lot about maths and physics. I've been using sdl and libgdx for making games for a while now. And moved on to opengl mainly for 2d graphics(for adding efects and stuff that was harder or imposible with other 2d libs).

From what I've seen, it should support up to OpenGL 4.1, so update your graphics drivers.

I can't. In my linux distro the best i can get is opengl 3.0