>Is hardware support really as bad as you seem to make it sound? I've loaded >various versions of Mandrake on a variety of different systems, and I've never >had any problems that I couldn't easily fix.
Hardware support has gotten amazingly good, actually. However, in fifteen to twenty minutes, I can do some research on the net, ask on an e-mail list and ask some friends and come back with a fairly good idea of the main issues that I need to consider if I am going to have a Win PC built. That doesn't mean that I don't need to continue with some more research before I actually willing to balls on go out and tell my tech guy what kind of mainboard, processor, video card and sound card I want, but it is a lot more straight forward than with Linux. Despite this great list, I still have absolutely no idea what kind of video card to get. Installation on complete systems has on the other hand improved dramatically. >Is Linux really "too dependent on hardware manufacturers"? After all, >there are >open source drivers for most major pieces of hardware, developed independently >of the manufacturers. Even ATI and Nvidia video cards have open source drivers >(in addition to proprietary ones from the companies themselves). > If the Linux community has a difficult time convincing hardware producers to provide specs for those that would like to code drivers or if the companies don't provide them themselves without a massive lobbying effort, or where reverse engineering has to be used to develop a driver, than yes, the Linux community IS too dependent. >I'm not sure if I'm understanding you correctly, but are you suggesting >that the >open source community make their own hardware products from scratch? In most >cases, this is far more trouble than it's worth, and we'd be better off simply >lobbying manufacturers to support GNU/Linux. There are some products made >specifically to run GNU/Linux, like the Zaurus (as you have mentioned). The >closest thing to your proposal would be the Simputer (http:// >www.simputer.org). >It would be economically unfeasible (and unnecessary) for a group of people to >join together and decide to produce, say, a sound card. Even if it were >possible, they would never reach sufficient economies of scale to make a >decent >return on the investment. There is more to a company than technical expertise, >with or without external funding. It would be much simpler to make GNU/Linux >drivers for an ordinary device. Why should I buy a new graphics card >simply so I >can use GNU/Linux? I want my existing hardware to work, as do most other >people >(particularly newbies). In many cases, yes it would be economically unfeasible to produce Linux specific products (but not all) and yes, I would like my existing hardware to work on Linux as well. This is a quandary that all "small" OS's face when dealing with a desktop market dominated by Microsoft and there is no simple solution. Less competition on GUI related apps, despite the historical differences between KDE and GNOME, would free up a lot of resources for other projects and in the long term would create a GUI that had a uniform structure, regardless of app. Things like uniform copy, cut and paste that were the original issues that led to this list discussion. A uniform workstation hardware standard would help as well. Linux has a larger desktop install base than Apple, but is unable to leverage as well. >There are few reasons to install Mandrake 8.0 when 8.1 is the latest >version. I >agree that a downloadable list might be nice, though. There are also plenty of >GNU/Linux sites that have lists of supported hardware and descriptions on >how to >get particular pieces of hardware to work. Again, yes there probably are many sites that have these lists, but if I like Mandrake, why should I have to look any other place than the Mandrake site for info that I need? Maybe this is another of the differences between the Mac and Linux communities. The Mac community is used to using a few sites/e-mail lists that provide 99.9% of the information that they need. Newbies to Linux would benefit from this as well. My Mac experience living abroad has taught me to be resilient and to try to solve hardware and software problems to a large degree by myself. There are large black holes in the world, where you no longer can get Mac support on site, unlike ten years ago. None of this has prepared me for what should be a relatively simple task, trying to find out which video cards on sale in Indonesia, have Linux drivers available. This isn't a rant, just a fact. Maybe others on the list will think that I am just whining, but the fact is that I have visited the first twenty sites, searched Google and am still as much in the dark as I was to start with. This isn't user friendly, not to mention newbie friendly. My 0.02 Euros, Brian
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