What do you think about this?

[Calum]

two points.

1) linux' growth is being hindered by all the wincrap hardware out there, but nobody can do anything about it except the people who make the hardware or perhaps if somebody wants to go to the trouble of reverse engineering a driver for some POS rubbish. the simple solution is, if you want a piece of computer hardware, stop buying egg sandwiches instead. or as is pointed out before, maybe send emails to a company asking them to switch from making egg sandwiches to making computer hardware because you won't be buying any more egg sandwiches from them as they won't connect into your computer, if you get my meaning.

2) people often bitch about hardware support in linux. well you know what?

* linux runs on a much wider diversity of hardware than windows does. try installing windows on a Sun workstation or any of the other machines linux can run on that windows can't, including the 64 bit ones.

* many hardware vendors turn out egg sandwiches designed to only work in windows. These articles cannot in my opinion be rightly described as computer hardware, but you know what? a lot of people STILL get those items to work in linux AND they publish their work for FREE, how often does that sort of cooperation happen in the 30-day-trialware world of windows?

* when i installed windows, i had a bunch of manufacturers' driver disks. one for the monitor, one for the video card, one for the sound card, one for the mouse, one for the keyboard et cetera. i needed to install all this crap to get my computer to work properly in windows. 16 colours on a 640px screen with no sound is not my idea of a working system right now. In linux i needed none of that stuff to get my kit working. how much hardware is autodetected by linux these days upon install compared with the pathetic windows attempts? i have still not needed to install a single driver in linux other than the ones that came with it. tell me how that shows linux has bad hardware support?

basically this stuff about how people already have a computer and they want linux to run on it perfectly is like saying somebody has a commodore 64 and they want to run windows 2000 on it. it cannot be done. the hardware is simply out of date, and does not support many things that the system requires in order to function. may i just add however that a version of linux exists for that commodore 64 so don't throw it out because at least one decent system still supports that hardware.

[sh00der]

Now come on Calum, didn't you have an egg sandwich USB CD burner and problems with your sound card in RedHat?

I am not making my point very well, my apologies for that. My install went excellent considering that all of my hardware was purchased without any thought at all for Linux. Everything was auto-detected and set up apart from my modem and soundcard (on-board). It took me a while but I got them working and that was due to my lack of Linux knowledge rather than driver availability. My problems began when trying to use external devices, my PDA (again I got it working after some digging), the digital camera and the card reader - I haven't tried my USB scanner yet. Here's my point...
The majority of the people I know already have computers and use external devices of some sort. Some know a great deal about computers, some know next to nothing. What is there to draw these people to Linux if it means that they will have to sell some of their equipment to replace it with Linux compatible devices? The people who don't know much certainly wouldn't be comfortable with re-compiling kernels and such. Don't the people already with hardware represent a larger piece of the pie than those who are starting from scratch?

[Calum]

yeah but my point still stands. if your mates all owned amigas and they all decided to use windows, then they would have to buy new hardware, how ludicrous, and yet that's what people did back when everybody was using those 8 bit machines! and hardware was a damn sight more expensive then than what it is today. how many people today use amigas? commodores? radio shack computers? nobody. they all use IBM-PC compatibles with windows on. people had to buy new hardware to get the benefits and they did. it took some years, but it happened.

not only that but if the hardware situation is so dire then why should those people be drawn to linux? if they desperately need to get their pile of egg sandwiches working and they already have an egg sandwich compatible machine then they might be wiser to wait till somebody writes an egg sandwich driver for linux before they switch. there's no such thing as a free lunch (even if it's egg sandwiches) and nobody's going to coma and dole out free computer hardware to people who change of their own free will, but two things still stick out like a pair of sore thumbs to me:

* linux is compatible with a LOAD of hardware, WITHOUT third party drivers. MANY MANY MANY more pieces of hardware are supported by linux than by windows out of the box. MANY that is. if somebody is having a problem with their hardware then either they bought one of the minority devices that windows supports and linux doesn't, or else (much more likely) they paid money to a company that enjoys providing binary only drivers for windows and sweet FA for linux. this one is easy to rectify, just get all the people who are pissed off their thing doesn't work under linux to email the idiot who is in charge of the drivers till they release it for linux.

* the open source nature of the linux kernel more or less guarantees that support for most devices will get added pretty quickly. basically unless there's a workaround that everybody's using or the manufacturer has made it hard to write drivers for this particular sandwich, somebody's bound to write a driver for it sooner or later (and going by the windinosaur timetable, it's likely to be sooner).

Now whether this new driver will have a shiny dumbass point and click interface is another matter.

how very astute of you to point out my sound card problems and even to remember my USB CDWriter issue (that was a long time ago!) but actually the sound card issue can be fixed by using alsa (which i haven't got round to doing yet) and the USB CD writer issue seems to not have been fixed simply because there's no issue with internal CD writers, or else there might be some way to do a SCSI/USB emulation thing but to be honest i preferred the solution of selling it to somebody who uses windows...

anyway, you have good points but who's to blame here? not linux, but those who turn out proprietary egg sandwiches by the ton. don't shoot the messenger, just because i have had hardware problems also does not mean i sympathise with the "windows just works" crowd. see here for more of my thoughts on this attitude.