Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 8th Apr 2008 12:40 UTC, submitted by SEJeff
Here's an update on the Linux Driver Project. "The Linux Driver Project is alive and well, with over 300 developers wanting to participate, many drivers already written and accepted into the Linux kernel tree, and many more being currently developed. The main problem is a lack of projects. It turns out that there really isn't much hardware that Linux doesn't already support. Almost all new hardware produced is coming with a Linux driver already written by the company, or by the community with help from the company. There are two main classes of hardware, video input devices and wireless network cards, that is not well supported by Linux, but large efforts are already underway to resolve this issue, with the wireless driver issue pretty much taken care of already, however there are a few notable exceptions. Because of this, our main effort has turned into one of education. Educating vendors of how to become members of the Linux kernel community, proper coding standards and procedures, and how to get their code into the kernel tree."
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Member since:
2005-11-02
If it were a metter of complaining you'd be right.
Since many of us have the goal of Linux destroying Windows and coming to dominate the desktop market, we naturally want to do anything that furthers this goal. We advocate the production of (and write the software for) friendly end-user applications, installer routines, etc. so that Windows users may be converted with ease to Linux.
Understand please that outside the enthusiast and advocate circles users are efectively stupid. I mean no disrespect, but few purchasers of a Dell are going to be able to figure out what chip drives its wireless card, even if they knew enough to try and find out. You cannot tell these people "Shun Broadcom." The only viable solution is to make sure that *no matter what they buy*, it works. The same goes doubly for those who have existing hardware.
Thus it is not *complaining* when people say that Linux sucks. What a user might mean is "I could not get my broadcom chip to connect to a WPA network" but what they *say* is "Linux doesn't work." If they complain to Canonical because they found this to be the case in Ubuntu, an answer of "We don't write the kernel" would not be appropriate. The user is stupid, remember? he isn't going to know how to post a bug report to the LKML, he doesn't know that it's really Broadcom's fault, and he wont try to find out. He'll just switch back to Windows.
Maybe you're okay with that, I know a lot of people say that if you can't make Linux work for you you should just stick with Windows (with a subtext of "You useless ignorant lunk.") I, as a Linux advocate who would like to see it come to dominate Windows in the desktop market, do not want to see users switch back to Windows. I want to make sure that whatever a user tries to do he succeeds in doing. I don't want to shun Broadcom, I want to get Broadcom wireless chipset support fixed.