2 ms·

I'm totally feel you on the mind-numbing latency that seems to exist with Linux drivers and any sort of semi-modern technology. It's funny you mention Xorg brea

I'm totally feel you on the mind-numbing latency that seems to exist with Linux drivers and any sort of semi-modern technology. It's funny you mention Xorg breaking. It's unbelievable how fragile Xorg is. I remember a decade ago booting Ubuntu for the first time and struggling to get X working with an old nvidia mobile chipset, and any single change in the terribly complex Xorg conf files would cause a failure to boot, forcing me into console mode. Looking back, Linux was quite unfriendly regarding drivers and support, but I feel it's made a lot of progress for more popular systems. It's an innate problem of Linux itself. Maybe we should focus on the systems that are certified or well-supported by Linux out-of-box like the dell xps series, similar to how people perceive macOS as part of a hardware-software amalgamation, even though a hackintosh community exists.

Declanomous 10y ago
Yeah, the weirdest thing is that the chipset this thing used was released almost two years ago. Regarding drivers, it's always fun to plug something that is 20 years old in to my computer and have it work. I like showing off to my friends by using something that last had a supported driver for Windows 98. However it's a bit embarrassing when something that should work doesn't. I'd love to contribute more, but I'm not capable of writing drivers from scratch, and a lot of drivers are just hacks built on top of hacks. I wish building drivers didn't involve hours of reverse engineering proprietary protocols. For instance, I managed to get a dymo desktop label printer working, but only with one font size, and I can't actuate the cutter. I'd be more than happy to finish the driver if Dymo released the specs for their protocol, but as it stands I'm just happy I can get the minimum level of functionality out of it. This entire conversation makes me realize why people think I'm a masochist for using Linux.

Declanomous 10y ago

Yeah, the weirdest thing is that the chipset this thing used was released almost two years ago. Regarding drivers, it's always fun to plug something that is 20 years old in to my computer and have it work. I like showing off to my friends by using something that last had a supported driver for Windows 98. However it's a bit embarrassing when something that should work doesn't. I'd love to contribute more, but I'm not capable of writing drivers from scratch, and a lot of drivers are just hacks built on top of hacks. I wish building drivers didn't involve hours of reverse engineering proprietary protocols. For instance, I managed to get a dymo desktop label printer working, but only with one font size, and I can't actuate the cutter. I'd be more than happy to finish the driver if Dymo released the specs for their protocol, but as it stands I'm just happy I can get the minimum level of functionality out of it. This entire conversation makes me realize why people think I'm a masochist for using Linux.