> The key part of this announcement for me is the last sentence, where they announce a deal with Qualcomm for extended security update support. ... in exchang

> The key part of this announcement for me is the last sentence, where they announce a deal with Qualcomm for extended security update support. ... in exchange for no longer having to upgrade their drivers. In my opinion they are the winner here, they have much less work than before. > From an environmental and sustainability perspective, we need to lengthen support periods, but from a commercial perspective, chipset vendors want to sell the next shiny chipset. Getting Treble somewhere towards ACPI/UEFI (you can boot Windows 10 or Linux 5.10 on pretty much any x86_64 system, even if the motherboard maker has abandoned it) as a standard hardware layer is one small step towards that, but there's still a long road ahead I fear. I agree, though it's hardly as simple. We've stuck to Gbps ethernet for a decade now so drivers have long been included mainline. But we're progressing on LTE capabitilies at every new SoC, so it requires new drivers. On "PC" (server, desktops), the only thing that evolves that need drivers is the graphic card, so keeping up with the driver is ok. My understanding is that Google (or rather Android) wants to fix this with Fuchsia: OEMs will provide "user-space"-only drivers and Fuschsia will guarantee ABI compatibility forever. That's really not the way ChromeOS people do things though, who prefer integrating drivers into mainline Linux, and so far ChromeOS people have a much better track record than Android at upgrading. (Though again it's easier on "PC")