Artem Tashkinov: Independent Hardware Vendors Hate Linux

[Michael_S]

Sure they hate it. They want to release a quickly hacked driver as closed source with poor quality, never do any updates or fixes and drop support as fast as they can so you have to buy new hardware.

Put yourself in the position of Intel, AMD, or Apple. The old hardware that you're not manufacturing any more? Anyone that is going to buy it already did. So what financial benefit do you get from every dollar spent on updating the drivers? Zero. It's not even planned obsolescence - Apple is less focused on getting you to buy a newer Macbook than they are focused on the fact that they don't get any more money from you for supporting the old one.

That screws consumers, of course. That's why free software drivers are a better option. But it's completely understandable why businesses operate this way.

I'm still holding out hope that RISC-V and similar projects will start putting out products that are open from top to bottom, hardware and software. Imagine if enough people can get good experiences from products like that, and long support cycles. The whole market will shift to that model, and any company that keeps operating the old way will go out of business.

[duby229]

To be fair, it is a very recent development that the open source drivers for AMD for example have started to be competitive. And we are all whitness to the growing pains this entails. I am not saying that this isn't the way to go but shit drivers have very little to do with being open source or not. At the moment, AMD is burdened by maintaining two drivers on linux. Nobody knows if the progress of their open driver will translate to other platforms or if it will simply be an additional effort. Also, Nvidia is frequently praised for their oh-so-great closed source drivers. Driver quality has little to do with being open source.

To be fair, thats not true at all. The worst thing you could ever say about AMDs OSS drivers is that they were incomplete. And with just a few specific exceptions, it's been really stable. R600 supported hardware has been stable for a really long time already. Not all, but most users are very happy with these drivers.

[bug77]

Put yourself in the position of Intel, AMD, or Apple. The old hardware that you're not manufacturing any more? Anyone that is going to buy it already did. So what financial benefit do you get from every dollar spent on updating the drivers? Zero. It's not even planned obsolescence - Apple is less focused on getting you to buy a newer Macbook than they are focused on the fact that they don't get any more money from you for supporting the old one.

That screws consumers, of course. That's why free software drivers are a better option. But it's completely understandable why businesses operate this way.

I'm still holding out hope that RISC-V and similar projects will start putting out products that are open from top to bottom, hardware and software. Imagine if enough people can get good experiences from products like that, and long support cycles. The whole market will shift to that model, and any company that keeps operating the old way will go out of business.

Eh, you picked Apple out of the three and opened up a whole different discussion.
Because of the three, Apple is the most likely to supports their older hardware. Why? Because they don't make money off their hardware, they make money off their services. And if your hardware stops working, you can't access their services anymore. And that's a trend these days.

And good luck with RISC-V. There aren't enough volunteers to pick up AMD's documentation and build a fully functional driver for (some of their) GPUs, AMD still does most of the work and you think out of nowhere a team to maintain a whole CPU architecture will materialize out of the blue?

[-MacNuke-]

But it's completely understandable why businesses operate this way.

Understandable? Maybe. Acceptable? No.

I mean... if I would get near bug-free drivers that support everything that the hardware is capable of... maybe. Do I get that? No. Not generally.

Does Apple fix problems with some wireless LAN chips? No. Does Intel fix their closed OpenGL implementation? No. Does AMD fix it? No. Do closed source Android drivers have high quality? No.

The point is... the author claims that I only get proper support for my hardware with closed source drivers. And then I look at my computers... the answer is: No. These systems are working better under Linux with Open Source drivers because the "closed source manufacturer" just abandoned it. Even for up-to-date hardware the whole assumption that closed source drivers are giving you _proper_ support is just wrong.

[Azrael5]

He exaggerates but linux operating system developers sometimes appears to be a lot so that linux to be detested.

[Azrael5]

When the transition to wayland is finalized I assume linux operating systems will be almost mature for desktop. Linux has the advantage to be able to optimize the hardware when hardware is well supported by kernel and drivers. So it should prevail in the same situation compared to microsoft or mac operating systems on the same platform. IF linux will be able to outperform the other 2 alternatives it will be appreciated above all by GAMERS. Gamers don't care platform they interest performance (matching stability): to reach the max result by the minimum effort. Linux con still improve itself unless windows or mac.

[bug77]

When the transition to wayland will be finalized I assume linux operating systems will be almost mature for desktop. Linux has the advantage to be able to optimize the hardware when hardware is well supported by kernel and drivers. So it should prevail in the same situation compared to microsoft or mac operating systems on the same platform. IF linux will be able to outperform the other 2 alternatives it will be appreciated above all by GAMERS. Gamers don't care platform they interest performance (matching stability): to reach the max result by the minimum effort. Linux con still improve itself unless windows or mac.

Such innocence, grasshopper... Once the market is saturated, it's saturated and that's that.
Look at how Microsoft failed in the smartphone space with an OS that has received generally good reviews. The smartphone market was booming when that happened and users still didn't care for a third player. And now think that on the desktop, a waning market, Wayland is all that's missing for Linux to take off?

[schmidtbag]

It's just this week's episode of Birdie lies about shit. Really nothing to see here. Move along. What's next Michael are you going to write articles about what AboutTheBSDs writes?

Poke fun of Artem and Michael all you want - controversy, regardless of accuracy or significance, brings in a lot of traffic (and as a result, ad revenue). They know what they're doing.

[torsionbar28]

But then again, many of you will probably agree GNU/Linux has already succeeded on an enormous scale -- well, at least in clouds, servers, and workstations.

Not only in cloud, servers, and professional workstations - also in switches, routers, firewalls, and other embedded devices. Things you wouldn't think of, like Fibre Channel SAN switches, as well as consumer set-top TV boxes, are all running on Linux nowadays. Linux has been displacing VXworks and other embedded operating systems for many years now.

The "IT guy" argues that hardware vendors hate dealing with the Linux kernel over the lack of control, the frequent breakage of the Linux kernel API, the inability for some vendors to publish documentation on their hardware

1. Lack of control is a bogus argument. These vendors are free to examine the source code, and submit patches upstream, which is more control than they have over a closed source black-box OS like Windows.
2. Kernel API breakage is addressed by a number of LTS releases. RHEL/CentOS, SLES, etc. all maintain a consistent and compatible API and ABI for the life of the release. For more cutting edge distros, yes, you need to update your code to be compatible with the latest kernel API. Is it really that hard? It's normally only a few lines worth of changes.
3. Inability to publish documentation sounds like a personal problem. This has nothing to do with the Linux kernel or community.

[mphuZ]

Need someone to develop a user space Linux..
But who ? Ubuntu is already gone.. If only all hope for Valve, but they don't even want to listen to and answer such questions.