Re: Linux on the desktop - it's come a long way, but is it there yet?

["Tom Metro-12" <user=71@nabble.blu.org>]

 Derek Martin wrote: 
> Remember that Microsoft is a near monopoly, and that hardware vendors 
> code drivers that work to Microsoft's specifications before they 
> release a product.  With Linux, some vendors do this, but many simply 
> still don't care about the Linux platform, leaving the job to be done 
> by the thousands of developers who volunteer their free time to do so. 

That was a good explanation for the situation 10 years ago. Now Linux 
development is heavily sponsored by large corporations like IBM, Novel, 
and RedHat. So the real question is why isn't new hardware supported 
more quickly by these commercial OS vendors? 

The answer is probably that there is just too much hardware to cover 
even by these large companies with deep pockets. With Windows, Microsoft 
writes drivers themselves only for a minority of the hardware. The 
vendors do the rest. 

So we're back to the usual chicken-and-egg problem where vendors don't 
feel compelled to support a platform that doesn't have a big market 
share, and consumers aren't drawn to a platform that doesn't support the 
hardware they want to use. Of course this is slowly changing in Linux's 
favor, but is still a far way from the "tipping point." 


Peter Petrakis wrote: 
> You're implying that the vendors have nothing to lose by releasing 
> their hardware specs, which is simply untrue. There's the stuff they 
> can measure like support costs and the stuff they can't measure like 
> is some company out there who's good at reverse engineering going to 
> rip off their product. 

I'm generally of the mind that companies should be in the hardware 
business or the software business, but not both (at least not where a 
single product is concerned). So if they make the hardware, then the 
software should be free or the hardware interface openly documented. 

This idea tends to fall apart when it comes to graphics cards because 
the hardware vendors have become highly dependent on the software 
drivers to outperform their competitors, and thus they understandably 
don't want to open source them. 

I think documenting the hardware interfaces is a red herring, and 
somewhat pointless to try and keep hidden. A real competitor can afford 
to spend a few weeks with a PCI bus analyzer to reverse engineer exactly 
what the interface is doing. I think the real reason is that if the 
interface was openly documented, the hardware would likely perform 
poorly without all the proprietary tricks they do in the driver, and 
they don't want to divulge those to give up their competitive edge. 

Have things improved with ATI since AMD's acquisition? 


To address Rich's original question: 
> Linux on the desktop - it's come a long way, but is it there yet? 

If you do a fair comparison, such as bundling the software and hardware 
together so there aren't compatibility issues (the vast majority of 
Windows users these days get bundled hardware), and you look at just the 
desktop itself, then I think Linux is well past the point of being 
useful for most people. The sticking point is most likely to be 
applications, still. 

And by the way, driver support in new Windows releases for relatively 
new hardware isn't all that great either. The drivers will probably 
exist, but they may be unusably buggy. I experienced this personally 
when W2K came out and I used it on a new system build. It was quite a 
while before Matrox had a usable W2K driver as I recall. I don't recall 
having problems with XP, but I've read about similar problems with Vista 
(which I haven't used on a system build and probably wont). 

  -Tom 

-- 
Tom Metro 
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA 
"Enterprise solutions through open source." 
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/

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