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> Linux purposely makes proprietary drivers crap. As the situation on windows shows us, the alternative is drivers that are crap for other reasons. If Linux o
by catalogia 7y ago
> Linux purposely makes proprietary drivers crap.
As the situation on windows shows us, the alternative is drivers that are crap for other reasons. If Linux offered a stable binary interface for drivers, we'd have proprietary drivers that "worked" but were nevertheless still crap insofar as they were essentially malware, as is the case with this wacom driver.
- nerdponx 7y agoA standardized ABI does not inevitably lead to malware closed drivers. That's a ridiculous assertion. Device managers don't care about Linux anyway, and wouldn't suddenly start caring if Linux announced a stable ABI.
- catalogia 7y ago> Device managers don't care about Linux anyway, and wouldn't suddenly start caring if Linux announced a stable ABI. From what I've seen, facilitating proprietary drivers seems like the motivation of most people lamenting the lack of a stable ABI. An example of this being the comment I responded to; "Linux purposely makes proprietary drivers crap. [...]" Discounting proprietary drivers under the assumption that they wouldn't be written anyway, what does a stable ABI afford us? Out-of-tree FOSS drivers? In other words, drivers that aren't good enough to be accepted into the kernel?
- Polylactic_acid 7y agoOut of tree foss drivers are still not affected since you could most of the time just recompile them to work with the latest kernel. Also when I said linux made proprietary drivers crap I meant that as a good thing. It lead to open source drivers where there otherwise would not have been. Some OEMs like AMD eventually went open source on linux while remaining proprietary on windows.
- the8472 7y agoAnd yet google is pushing hard to keep ABI stable in the name of extending android support because manufacturers just won't release their SoC drivers.
- kick 7y agoProprietary surveillance company is okay with manufacturers creating proprietary drivers to be used for surveillance. Shocking.
- Polylactic_acid 7y agoProbably because desktop users expect their hardware to continue to work for a long time and to keep up with OS updates. For mobile people have been conditioned to accept throwing away and buying a new device every 2 years.
- dTal 7y agoRather cheeky to urge the Linux developers to change their ways so that Google can continue to profit off GPL violations.
- MaxBarraclough 7y agoThanks for mentioning the elephant in the room. Is there a reason the Linux folks don't do something about this? If I were them I wouldn't be happy seeing my licensing terms treated like a joke.
- snvzz 7y agoIf this was true, the BSDs would have terrible drivers. What happens instead is Linux drivers are mostly BSD ports. Go figure.
- dredmorbius 7y agoISTR a discussion some years back over the lagging of drivers on the BSDs relative to Linux. Not finding that now, though there's a 2014 discussion of a driver wrapper for FreeBSD to access Linux device drivers: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzMjY https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzMjY Linux of course also makes use of some driver wrappers, the most well-known of which is probably NDISwrapper, supporting wireless networking cards: http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page