On Friday 25 March 2011, Len Brown wrote: > > Please don't turn Linux into second Windows. > > No worry there. > > I mention Microsoft not to advocate that Linux be Windows, > but to point out that this (hardware/firmware) ship sank 5 years > ago and Linux is still on the boat. MS was able to delete > APM support in 2006 from their source tree, yet we still carry it. And we also support ISA cards (network/sound/whatever). That's why many people (including me) like and use Linux. Take any old machine that has enough power to do the job you want and install Linux - e.g. get a Pentium box, install Debian and you have a mail server (and if you need to power it down, you need APM too). It's not possible with any other OS (well, maybe *BSD but Linux has more drivers). If we remove support for older HW, Linux will never get a decent desktop market share. The common use case is "new Windows will not run (or run slow) on that (old) box, let's try Linux". > > If you don't want APM in the > > kernel, just don't compile it. There are many people using older systems > > with APM - and most of them wouldn't oppose to this removal as they don't > > even know about it. > > They can still run old Linux on an old APM-only laptop -- > just like they can still run Windows 3.1 or Windows XP if they want to. > > What we'd be taking away is their ability to run the latest > Linux kernel on that laptop. And that's bad. With Linux philosophy, you need new kernel to get new HW support. So if you have an APM-only laptop and would want to use a new USB device, you're out of luck. What to do then? Delete Linux and install Windows XP? > The issue at hand is people (like me) who have to maintain > the latest Linux source code. In sort, I don't want to > write, debug, and test a cpuidle driver for an apm-only laptop > when I could be spending effort on code that people will > actually run. So don't do it then. If APM works now, keep it as is. Just like hgafb (HGA hardware is from 1984). -- Ondrej Zary _______________________________________________ linux-pm mailing list linux-pm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-pm
