I had a discussion with a friend about a week ago about Linux and hardware support. Basically it was the endless loop that " Linux's popularity is directly related to the amount of hardware support which is based on it's popularity of the OS"
Blah, blah, blah. For a desktop machine I'll give it that much but for servers or routing boxes I'd say the hardware support is more or less there already.
For desktop purposes, we can do with more drivers but the important ones (ATI, Nvidia, sound) are more or less in place.
So I took the question to the other side of the fence to a friend who
works in high upper management, who's words carries a lot of weight, for
a highly respected hardware manufacture, well at least for printers in
my book.
hmm...such drivers for non-postscript printers are not necessarily Linux kernel drivers...the same drivers will probably work on any Unix platform they are compiled on.
"Give me a list of what the Linux community is seeking as far as hardware support and I'll see if I can get some bodies working on it. With a convincing email or two and we should be able to get it done"
Including stuff other than printers? :P
I know nothing is for certain (besides: death and taxes :) but I would
like to write the email just to get the issue out there. so I'm asking
What do we want from manufactures? Just great stable drivers? GPL
drivers? And How can we convince them that writing drivers for Linux is
worth their time?
stable drivers is all that matters to me. GPL great but not required.
Drivers for any MPEG2/4 hardware encoder please :P
