this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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I think you're mistaken here. Getting a device hardware to work is not the distro job, it's the job of the hardware manufacturer. Even on windows, device manufacturers would submit their drivers to microsoft for certification. Some thing happen on linux, device manufacturers would submit their driver to kernel maintainer, but they must submit the source code instead of binaries so some companies that don't want to open up their source code due to misguided "trade secret" reason will never submit their driver to linux, even when the whole ecosystem unify behind a single distro. Some device manufacturers do release binary drivers for linux, but their licensing incompatible with the distros license so they can't be distributed by the distros.
Come one man, how is this strawmanning when you demand everyone to rally behind a single distro? Which distro maker got the most influence in linux development world right now? It's red hat with no close competitor in sight. Red hat's technical decisions already split linux communities. If they got even more influence, it's going to be bad for linux future. It'll going to be even more fragmented in a way that's worse than now.
Yet despite all the supposed problem you brought up, linux desktop marketshare is growing to 4% this year. Reaching 5% and beyond is not an impossibility in near future.
And we've already established that few hardware manufacturers, especially of peripherals, are interested on wasting the time to write and test code for 4% of their userbase. So if the manufacturer isn't going to do it, who will? And if your average user can't get their peripherals to work on an OS, what use is that OS to users?
Unless you have some plan to shame manufacturers into supporting linux, it WILL have to be a linux dev to do it.
Yes, because it is profitable.
With that many devs, it would be trivial to write FOSS drivers for everything, proven by the fact that this already happens for some peripherals, but again because of the fuckdamn spread out ecosystem no one can agree on any one correct way to do it so what you get is a ton of partially useful drivers where no one set supports all features, but all features are supported between all the sets. Meaning all features are possible to be implemented but no one team had the manpower or understanding to do it.
What result do you think would have occurred if everyone just worked on the same driver set till it worked?
Well fucking crack open the bottle of Chateau Le Fite' 78 linux FINALLY has about the same marketshare as web connected leapfrog gamepads...
And it only took 3 decades...
Again, I think you're mistaken here. The majority of linux devs are not working on reverse engineering device drivers here. They work on their own projects within the linux ecosystem. Working on reverse engineering a device is a hard work and volunteers won't do it except for a few very dedicated people like asahi linux devs. Rallying behind a single distro won't fix this unless the distro is made by a huge company willing to pay people to reverse engineers various drivers. Getting essential hardware works is important and that's where most volunteers device driver devs are working with, but I'm not convinced getting support for all devices in the market the best way forward simply because it takes too many manpower we don't actually have. Better spend that manpower on getting gnome and kde better, getting wayland better, or perhaps maintaining x11 again, etc.
Linux desktop marketshare wasn't even 1% with no growth in sight until relatively recently, so yeah, off course people are celebrating now. It's now comparable to Mac marketshare (~4%) in early 2010.
Ok, I'm so fuckdamn tired of this, so amazingly fuckdamn tired.
Fucking strawman
False dichotomy.
#THAT'S WHY POOLING ALL AVAILABLE MANPOWER UNDER A SINGLE DISTRO IS A WIN
Considering how long it has been around, and how many tens if not hundreds of thousands of people working on it, 5% is fucking terrible.
I mean, sure, celebrate, but it isn't even close to being the achievement to warrant it.
You bring nothing to this discussion but informal fallacies and spurious arguments, just like every other linuxbro I've had the displeasure to deal with.
Get blocked and get lost.
I'm just telling you that it's wrong to assume hardware support problem will be solved by unifying behind a single distro, while in reality device driver devs are already unified behind the linux kernel project (not distro projects) and there is not enough manpower because there are only a handful of devs have necessary skill and willing to donate their time to support random devices in the market (and they need to have the devices on their hands first for reverse engineering). As linux marketshare grows, device manufacturers may be willingly support linux on their own, so your future scanner might eventually work out of the box on linux.