On Thu, 25 Nov 2021 at 06:09, Tim via users <users@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> Tim: > >> See my prior email about "why should we have to do this, it's the > >> computer." > >> > >> In all seriousness, if a distro wants people to use it, don't make > >> them do deep forensics to figure out how to install drivers. The > >> computer should be doing this analysis for you. > > > John Pilkington: > > I think you misunderstand the way open source works. > > I don't think so, unless you're trying to be funny. We don't have to > do any of this pallaver for other several other graphics chipsets, > audio chipsets, USB chipsets, WiFi, etc. The system figures it out for > us. It was one of the great features of Linux of an install often > "just working" without any user jiggery pokery. > Many of the chipsets you mention have documentation, including source code for an example driver. In addition, many similar devices all use the same chips, so one linux user can write a driver that supports many devices. There is still work to maintain the USB product database, and particular devices can require passing some extra parameters to the driver, but that is all manageable.. All that is still far less effort than the reverse engineering required to provide Nvidia drivers, and the result (nouveau) is high maintenance and has limited functionality, but does support many use cases (mine included). Ultimately, what features you get in linux depends either on hobbyist level effort or commercial enterprises. The latter are mainly interested in large scale bitcoin mining and data centre use cases, so desktop graphics work that is too complex for hobbyists is not being done. In large enterprises, Microsoft is pushing to replace linux workstations with Windows+WSL, which takes advantage of Windows hardware support. This makes Windows a linux boot loader with access to enterprise email and training videos. Google has done a lot of interesting work with their android linux ecosystem -- using hardware abstraction layers and testing frameworks to make it easier for hardware vendors to write drivers. In the future we may see some android/linux hybrid entering the workstation market. -- George N. White III
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