On Thu, 25 Nov 2021 at 06:09, Tim via users <users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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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