On Wednesday 02 December 2009 19:07:22 Carlos E. R. wrote:
The users of a piece of hardware may have no idea how to fix a driver, they may be just users. People that know how to do that, devs, are probably tech lovers that love current, powerful hardware... so users are left stranded.
The same process works with any software. You can't find XP drivers for hardware that was out with win 98. If you need that hardware you either use win 98, or look for new hardware. The same is with Linux. When you are lucky some developer will maintain drivers for old hardware to work with new kernels, but if there is none, then you either use old kernel, or look for new hardware. My experience is that Linux still supports a lot more of 10 years old hardware, while other don't. My old computer is 8 years old and still runs fine. With another option the story would be completely different if a lot of large customers wouldn't require XP in order to avoid upgrade of every piece of software and hardware they have.
Told other way, it is wrong to assume that any user can maintain software by themselves.
Which is what Egbert told us with "oh, well", but the truth is that everybody can learn C to extent that will allow him/her to read the code, then ask for help and get that help. With other platforms you are stuck with vendor willingness to provide driver, which for old hardware, unless it is very popular and vendor would make angry a lot of people, means no driver. -- Regards Rajko, openSUSE Wiki Team: http://en.opensuse.org/Wiki_Team People of openSUSE: http://en.opensuse.org/People_of_openSUSE/About -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org