The growing image-processor unpleasantness

Intel had us almost forget completely how in the days past having 100% driver coverage of your hardware in Linux was the result of an incredible struggle, hunting for just the right parts, paying premium quite often, fighting through either some poorly written blobs that you had to hack into your kernel with a hammer, or patching some “open source” that had been thrown over the fence and promptly forgotten about.

But now we are starting to remember.

First there were fingerprint readers.

Certain sound chips.

Now there are webcams.

I dread anticipating new GPUs.

Suddenly “buy hardware two generations old” becomes a viable piece of advice again.