[geeks] The Dog's Breakfast: Microsoft Windows Vista

[Joshua Boyd]

On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 08:16:33AM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> >If Linux and UNIX in general can get increased hardware vendor support, in
> >part as a reaction against Vista, then maybe in the future it becomes the 
> one
> >that "just works".
> 
> Linux/UNIX are to "flavorful" to garner any significant vendor support, IMHO 
> - if a Linux driver is as easy/hard to write as an XP/Vista driver, they'll 
> choose to write the driver for the platform that makes their product 
> available to 90%+ of the market. To double the effort for an extra 5% seems 
> hardly worth it...

Of course, if vendors do the proper thing with the device drivers they
author, then most of the work of supporting all distrobutions is done
for them.  All they have to do is make the driver free to be included in
the kernel source tree.