Using programmable pipeline is not that difficult and it is unlikely that you are using large portion of FFP (fixed-function pipeline), so your shaders may end up being quite small and thus more efficient than using FFP; not to mention that you can do many more things in shaders and the code will be readily portable to OpenGL ES 2.0 (which has no FFP at all), should you decide to port to iOS/Android. There are many tutorials available (not to mention whole books) and you can always ask here.

Quote Originally Posted by User137 View Post
However deprecated they may be, do you believe they stop being added to drivers? It would mean many old games and graphical applications would stop functioning.
On typical systems where it is already available in drivers - unlikely. However, it is also unlikely that legacy code will be actively maintained leading to potential bugs and unpredicted behavior. Also, there is always a risk that at some point OpenGL 3 (or for that matter, OpenGL ES 2) could become forcefully minimal standard, especially on new platforms. I mean, for how long do you think they will keep supporting and publishing 15 year old code? OpenGL 2.0, which introduced programmable pipeline, has been out for 8 years already, while DirectX had it for 10 years now (since DX8 ). FFP has been dropped out from DX10 (6 years ago), and out of OpenGL 3 (4 years ago).