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Is this trolling or are you serious? Proprietary drivers are shipped with many distributions. For example nvidia drivers are shipped with Ubuntu. If the repo d

Is this trolling or are you serious? Proprietary drivers are shipped with many distributions. For example nvidia drivers are shipped with Ubuntu. If the repo drivers don't suit you, you can (just like on all other platforms) download drivers from the vendors website. Proprietary drivers are allowed and are shipped in many distros (just like in Android), but they cannot be included in the kernel upstream (then they wouldn't be proprietary). Every vendor is welcome and encouraged to submit their driver to the upstream linux kernel project. Some vendors do however chose not to do so, for a variety of terrible-to-mediocre reasons.

ynnn 7y ago
Welcomed and encouraged to submit their driver for consideration. I would guess that the vast majority of vendor-proprietary drivers would get rejected from upstream, so for most cases the viable options for vendors wishing have an driver in mainline are to improve an existing reverse-engineered driver or rewrite the driver to fit the kernel standards.
- megous 7y ago
  If they accounted for mainlining from the start and not just as an afterthought, they would not have this issue.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    A lot of the drivers are older than their Linux port, which makes mainlining from the start not really make sense. Nvidia and PowerVR I know for a fact are in that category.
    - megous 7y ago
      Sure, that makes sense.
- robert_foss 7y ago
  Getting your driver accepted upstream is a conversation with the maintainers of that kernel part. You can't just throw a pile of code over the fence and assume it will be accepted. When adding support for your device keep in mind that this is something everyone wants, maintainers/users/vendors alike.