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I don't think drivers are what warrants Linux its popularity / indispensability. I worked in a few places where people, well, at least moderately, liked to wri

I don't think drivers are what warrants Linux its popularity / indispensability. I worked in a few places where people, well, at least moderately, liked to write drivers. Also, consider that it would've been definitely possible to write an OS with a mechanism for module loading compatible with Linux drivers. My take on this question would be the ease of use for application developers. This ease of use consists of plenty of somewhat ready-to-use libraries that cover plenty of use-cases, huge community that both produces documentation and will answer questions should you have any, multiple hardware vendor support, and of course, licensing. It's possible to compete with Linux in very special, very narrow use-cases, but trying to win against Linux on every front would require an insane amount of effort by a very large group of people.

weinzierl 3y ago
"Also, consider that it would've been definitely possible to write an OS with a mechanism for module loading compatible with Linux drivers." Sure, you can do that and it will work exactly until the next change in the driver interface, which is not very long. So you end up in maintenance hell and will still constantly be behind the curve, because Linux gets all the updates first. You will be less secure too, because you'll get the security patches later. That being said, someone in a similar thread from a few days ago said one of the BSDs does that. Maybe it's not that bad.