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When you say "choose your hardware for your software", you are assuming the software has already been chosen by the time the hardware is selected. That's not ne
by cesarb 9y ago
When you say "choose your hardware for your software", you are assuming the software has already been chosen by the time the hardware is selected. That's not necessarily the case. I already have the hardware, it's been bought years ago, and it works with the software I use. Now if for instance I wanted to evaluate OpenSolaris, but it didn't run on the hardware I have, I would probably pass it up. I wouldn't invest hours and hours coding support for it to run on my hardware, before I were sure I would have a use for it. And that's assuming I could; I do happen to know how to write a low-level driver, but many people who would otherwise be interested on the software might not have that knowledge and/or ability.
Of course, once you already use the software, the situation inverts itself. I do choose only hardware which is known to work well with Linux, since that's the operating system I use, and I have even ported a device driver when that wasn't the case. But that can only happen because, many years ago when I first tried Linux, it worked perfectly with the hardware I had.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoI think that this argument holds up, but fails to justify the huge engineering cost of supporting large amounts of proprietary consumer hardware. If you want to evaluate it but don't have the hardware, try qemu.
- jen20 9y agoIf you wanted to evaluate it, surely you'd use a virtual machine?
- ksk 9y agoWhat kind of domain are you in that allows you to migrate code to random operating systems with such ease? In any case, I would be skeptical if changing OSs mid-business was the common case. More likely, I'd guess people choose the software stack before the hardware, based on their own experience, advice from others and/or other external factors (requirement to run existing applications, etc).