I'd like to make a simple-ish game with OpenGL, but I'm not sure if I should use the older (fixed function pipeline) versions or the newer (programmable pipeline thingy, with shaders and stuff) ones. Thoughts?

Start using the fixed pipeline if you don't know how to write glsl, then move to the programmable one, have fun!

@thaon I'm okay with and quite like GLSL (I've tried them on GLSL Shader Editor on Android a bit) but the whole thing with VBOs, VAOs and geometry shaders just seems overcomplicated to me.

Is there any way to use shaders with legacy OpenGL, by the way?

Not really, the programmable pipeline introduced shaders...