On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 8:29 PM, Michael Torrie <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Someone linked to it earlier in the thread. It is indeed defunct, since the >> official ACPI project stance is that these problems amount to bugs in their >> code, since regular users can hardly be expected to figure out loading of >> those tables. On the other hand, I imagine the number of platforms they can >> manage isn't huge. > > Somehow I think just saying the problem is the hardware isn't really > going to fly with a lot of potential linux users. Windows deals with > the bugs, so why can't Linux do it also? Seems like a cop out on the > part of the devs. Either you misunderstood me, or I'm misunderstanding you. They dropped the DSDT repository because they agree with this principle. Hardware bugs that can be worked around in software are essentially software bugs, so they treat them as such and fix them, which is essentially what Windows does. But any way you try to solve the problem, you run into the fact that Linux has a miniscule fraction of the installed base of laptop operating systems, so it doesn't make a lot of sense for anyone to employ armies of testers with various hardware samples to fix the issues. Windows is just going to have better support for the majority of laptops, except for rare cases were large numbers of influential Linux users converge on some laptop model. One of the attractive things about Apple hardware, from a Linux-using perspective, is that it's a relatively narrow set of targets that doesn't change terribly often. They've got a very different take on the PC sales model than most manufacturers, who have huge product ranges that are being constantly updated. It doesn't take a huge change to throw off some small hardware-related feature of a laptop, so platform stability is a highly desirable thing if you're trying to make all the hardware features work well. Even when the Titanium Powerbook G4s were fairly new, Linux worked really well on them because everyone who had one had pretty much the same thing, so everyone hit the same pain points and fixes helped everyone. I haven't actually tried running Linux on a recent MacBook, so I don't know if the experience is still as far ahead of the PC laptop Linux experience I get now with my Thinkpad as I remember it being, but I'd rather get used to a different keyboard than have a stupid laptop that won't reliably sleep and wake on demand. I'm probably weird that way, though. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
