Hi Jeff:
I'm totally agree with you except in one point:
>Hardware makers bend over backwards to make sure their products work
>with Windows. I doubt a number of hardware makers spend equal manhours
>on working with the linux kernel developers to make sure their hardware
>works with linux. That's a chicken and egg situation. You say desktop
>users need better hardware support before they will choose linux.. But
>hardware vendors are not going to provide better hardware support for
>linux until there is a large market of linux user worth their
>time....But users need better hardware support first...but hardware
>makers need more users first...but users need better hardware support
>first....
Porting one driver from Windows to Linux or another flavour of Unix is not
so difficult, only need to know I/O procedures an memory locations, then
let the hardware to do is work ( in a few words). The problem ( confirmated
with people working at hardware companies that I will not mention here, of
course) is how are made this drivers. You can release with your hardware a
driver very poor developed/designed if it's closed. Why spend time
optimizing, probing...? See that you can have updated drivers for a long
time, but hardware has not been changed. In the changelog they can say that
the new driver has solved one determinated problem and has been added any
new feature. First of all, you can't know if the things in the changelog
corresponds with the changes in the driver, and second, what new feature we
can have in a hardware bought one year before? Why this feature wasn't
implemented the first time?
ATI is opening is videocards specs to XFree developers and working actively
with them and it isn't loosing market for this, in fact, their products
work very well under Linux and must be well designed 'cause they will be
presented to de 'public' as they are. Another company that cames to my mind
is Conceptronics a filial of Tulip.
And to finish, we must get your first phrase literally "Hardware makers
bend over backwards to make sure their products work with Windows" but we
must add " but only works, not how well"
Regards
David Ballester Montolio
Responsable de Sistemas y Comunicaciones
Kern Pharma, S.L.
www.kernpharma.com
GNU!
