>The vendors won't do that because there's no stable ABI That only causes problems for vendors who only supplies proprietary drivers, of which there are very f

>The vendors won't do that because there's no stable ABI That only causes problems for vendors who only supplies proprietary drivers, of which there are very few these days (only ones I've personally come across are NVidia and Broadcom), and it's not as if the unstable ABI prevents them from supporting Linux either, since they do. Beyond that, reasons for why you'd want open source drivers are many, like the kernel devs being able to figure out and fix problems without having to rely on a third party (vendor), upgrade drivers to make use of new kernel functionality without waiting for the vendor to comply/agree, being able to audit them for security problems, being able to port them to every platform on which Linux runs, which includes platforms which the hardware vendor might not think worthwile to support, and of course other systems alltogether like the BSD's (stable ABI sure didn't get them more proprietary drivers), fringe OS'es like Haiku, Minix etc. So no, the answer is not to lose the flexibility of a changeable ABI, but to have vendors either supply fully open source drivers or the documentation necessary for creating open source drivers, which is pretty much the situation we have today, again with a few aforementioned holdouts.