On Friday 09 May 2008 17:48, John wrote:
True windoze takes a long time to install but hardware drivers are always available. Not so with linux.
Sadly enough, that's true in many cases. But it's the hardware makers who are to blame if they don't provide drivers or at least specifications how the hardware works so Open Source developers can write drivers. If the know-how of a piece of hardware is mostly in the (Windows) driver, they won't open that stuff up, so Open Source developers have to rely on reverse engineering to get anything working. Many inkjet photo printers and other kinds of hardware fall into that category. So whom do you blame for this?
There is also a bit of oss snobbery concerning closed source drivers eg Samsung printers
It's only snobbery up to a certain point. If you used such drivers for a while you will often find out that they are more of a liability than an asset, causing much more trouble again and again than you saved money by buying that cheaper hardware. I've been there. I learned the lesson that cheap hardware is very often expensive in working hours to get things working. I can't affort cheap hardware any more. ;-)
and why can't for instance nvidia drivers be maintained
Because of licensing issues. If we could, we'd ship the NVidia 3D drivers, but we can't.
Samsung for instance undated a clp500 driver for me in 3days after I complained that it no longer worked.
That's exceptionally good service. But I had personal experiences with the
cash'n'carry mentality so many hardware makers have these days. A customer
who already paid is no longer attractive for many of them, so they often
don't bother to update anything to make it work with more recent Linux
versions.
CU
--
Stefan Hundhammer