On Tue, 24 Jun 2014 18:03:54 Rohan McLeod wrote:
Laptops are particularly difficult in this regard. For a desktop system you can use expansion cards to replace most built-in hardware that lacks driver support. Sometimes with laptops it's just too much pain to get hardware working properly so you just live with a system that isn't fully functional. Thanks Russell much appreciated; I suppose the bits of integrated hardware on a particular laptop will be a very small demographic;
However a lot of senior Linux developers (including people who are paid to do kernel work) take pride in owning the latest laptop hardware...
so the laptop company will have even less motivation to develop a Linux driver and
Laptop companies generally don't develop any of the hardware in question, they assemble chipsets designed and manufactured by others. The companies that design the chipsets usually don't write drivers and the ones that they do write are probably going to be of the quality we expect from NVidia (I send NVidia cards to e-waste and pay for ATI cards).
presumably Linux driver developer's priorities will be 1/ getting their own hardware working 2/ writing drivers for the most common hardware ?
Probably the main priority for many developers will be writing drivers for enterprise gear that companies like Red Hat pay them to write. Of course Lenovo and Dell laptops see a lot of corporate use so you should do OK in that regard. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/