Re: Distros these days? What a mess!

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On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 11:25 -0700, iainduncan@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Am I the only one who feels like getting pro audio working these days is
> *harder* than two years ago??? It seems to me that in the race to make a distro
> that has everything working out of the box, we now have a bunch of things that
> are really screwed up for those of us with unusual needs, and now they are much
> harder to untangle. =(

I think you're right that the situation is getting worse, but I don't
think it's the distros fault - I think it's hardware.  As PCs get
cheaper and cheaper, the proliferation of hardware varieties has become
exponential.  For example, in 1998 99% of machines had a PIIX4 chipset
and you never heard of a distro not seeing someone's disks unless the
user did something wrong.  Nowadays there are several different ATA,
SATA, PATA, etc. chipsets from many different vendors several of who
STILL don't bother to make sure Linux works with their hardware.  For
example Marvell just last week gave the Linux kernel guys the
documentation to support their chipsets, which have been shipping for
months (years?).  HDA intel is another example, where the design is such
that in order to make it work you would need a sample of every f**king
laptop make and model on the planet, or documentation from every vendor,
where in the past it was enough to have the chipset docs.

The proliferation of hardware has nothing to do with performance - it's
just to make cheap junk cheaper and to fool users with useless "value
added" features like fakeraid.

Lee


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