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"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it.""Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it."Posted Aug 29, 2012 7:14 UTC (Wed) by Frej (subscriber, #4165)In reply to: "Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." by dskoll Parent article: Look and feel lawsuits, the second time around
Just works? Considering how broken the 6month upgrade cycle is for users, i doubt it.
'Oh you need spanky new webcam support?' Well you have to a) wait 3 months b) force upgrading everything else. Nice :)
But it's harsh, the model has other advantages but some really crappy downsides for 3rd party developers and hardware makers.
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"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 13:46 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Considering how broken the 6month upgrade cycle is for users, i doubt it. What 6-month upgrade cycle are you referring to? Debian certainly does not have such a cycle. Maybe Ubuntu does, but even Ubuntu has LTS releases. 'Oh you need spanky new webcam support?' Well you have to a) wait 3 months b) force upgrading everything else. Nice :) That's never been an issue for me. It's true that one time I did buy a webcam that needed a newer kernel than what I was running, but it was pretty easy to make a Debian kernel package and upgrading the kernel affected absolutely nothing else on my system. (I'm typing this on a Squeeze box running kernel 3.4.4.)
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 5:50 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
Perhaps amusingly, a 2007 IBM Thinkpad I have, equipped with an ATI 1300, only just got support for hardware GL acceleration in linux v3.4.2. I'm not sure what argument this fact might support.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 22:05 UTC (Fri) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link]
The X1300 (a R500 card) has been supported by Mesa for years, since at least 2008, I think.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 1, 2012 14:38 UTC (Sat) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
Unless it's a (Microsoft-Only-vendor)-specific version of the card. Not that that's ever bit me with my Dell i8600 which had a broken vbios that I had to install Windows XP back on to apply the fix for. Aside from IIRC having slightly different PCI information and a different vbios, I don't know what the various vendor-specific "flavors" of the cards do.
The long-term solution is to stop buying hardware that's designed to only run Windows and tested *just* enough to pass WHQL and instead buy from a Linux vendor so that they can begin to get the ODMs to explicitly support Linux or at least stop producing hardware that breaks so badly.
Yes, your selection is going to be more limited. Does even Apple have the selection of Dell, Lenovo, Sony, HP, etc. put together? No. Instead, help the Linux vendors get a solid support base to begin to push back on the ODMs. You know, like how Apple can get their suppliers to produce hardware that Only Works with Apple. If the Linux vendors have enough customers, they begin to have the power to fix the Linux hardware situation. Until then, they or you have to pick and choose your hardware carefully and try to see if they can fix its brokenness (or work around its brokenness in software, s.a. System76's drivers).
The short-term bonus of buying from a Linux vendor is that they do the picking, choosing, and working around for you instead. So you win long and short-term at the cost of some selection.
I swear, the smartest thing Apple ever did was make OSX only run on Apple hardware. Otherwise, we’d be hearing about how OSX is crap on random Windows consumer hardware because sound is flaky and it can’t suspend and resume right (and sometimes it can’t even turn itself off!) while Apple tries to source hardware from the ODMs with a market share in the single thousands of customers. You know, like e.g. ZaReason and System76 are trying to do it.
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