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Hardware needs more than a driver for proper supportHardware needs more than a driver for proper supportPosted Apr 8, 2008 10:33 UTC (Tue) by amartoq (guest, #1712)Parent article: A Linux Driver Project status report
I think the real issue here is hardware that just works. And the main missing part, that it must work *well*. My ATI Radeon Mobility X600 has been a PITA for the past 3 years... Yeah, I've got everything working but compiz never didn't work until now and suspend/hibernate never worked. I felt dissapointed because it worked, but my system didn't perform as well as I expected. I've got a logitech notebook webcam that performs pretty well in windows but not in linux. The reason? The light conditions are not handled by the linux driver. So, in a simple application like gnome Cheese, I don't see anything or got everything too bright. Yes, it works, but it doesn't work *as well* as expected again. And it performed poorly because my xorg.conf didn't include XV overlay as default. I had to figure that out, after reading some docs... For a hardware to work, there is a need for a driver. That's being covered in kernel or userspace; and I'm thankfully that I don't need to worry about installing drivers, just plug it in and it's automatically recognized. That's amazing! The issue is that it doesn't work always well. Many times the windows "driver" installer puts a lot of extra software that its needed and it's missing in linux. Or the linux port is far away of being comparable to the windows port, or it's too complicated to get the "useful" features. The hardware needs more than a driver for proper support.
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Hardware needs more than a driver for proper support Posted Apr 8, 2008 12:17 UTC (Tue) by osma (subscriber, #6912) [Link] Seconded. Having a basic working driver is a good first step, but often users expect more from their hardware. If we only look at driver status as a binary distinction between driver exists vs. driver missing, then from a user's point of view every device works in principle but not well in practice. This is still a huge step forward from the situation some years ago when a lot of hardware actually didn't work at all with Linux. If the situation with most classes of hardware is as good as Greg makes it sound, then we need to raise the bar higher and not just talk about missing drivers. As a personal story, I have a Dell X300 laptop with a memory card reader that barely works with the out-of-tree sdricoh_cs driver. IO is much slower than in Windows because the driver only does polling, no interrupts or DMA. I can't use the reader in practice to transfer pictures from my camera, it would take forever. I don't expect the situation to improve since no specs are available and the hardware is likely to be obsolete by now (so this is in Greg's "hard" category #2). But on a checklist, the card reader might be considered supported. Another example is the Intel video on the same laptop. Ubuntu Gutsy was the first distro that actually allowed me to make full use of an external 1280x1024 TFT display in a dual-head setup, thanks to the new RandR support in Xorg. Previous versions of Xorg either crashed outright or, at best, forced me to use ugly XGA resolution on the TFT. I still (as of Hardy beta) can't switch between laptop-only and dual-head modes without logging out of X (and often having to use a messed-up console to restart GDM). In WinXP display hotplugging has worked (almost) perfectly for at least two years.
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