- Joined
- 2 Aug 2005
- Posts
- 8,721
- Location
- Cleveland, Ohio, USA
The trouble with OpenGL is that since the (for all practical purposes) demise of SGI, it has come under the control of a board of companies that depend on OpenGL for their business. These are the big CAD/3D modeling/embedded houses; Autodesk being, by far, the worst offender. It is to their benefit that OpenGL remain unchanged. They exhibit the typical traits of a design-by-committee development model, where everything takes forever to implement and compromises must be made at every turn. MS, on the other hand, can do whatever it likes with DX/D3D. Back in the day D3D was a joke; OpenGL did everything faster, easier, had better driver support, better fallback measures, and more developers. Now the opposite is true. Even OpenGL stalwarts like John Carmack admit that DX is the way to go when developing desktop applications, especially games. OpenGL has been allowed to stagnate badly while MS does what it usually does --start with a poor product and improve it over the course of years until it has surpassed the competition. Heck, if MS wasn't such an intensely NIH-mindset company we'd probably see them on the OpenGL board helping advance it.
As far as sound, hardware detection, drivers, etc it is my distinct opinion that the Linux devs don't get nearly enough credit for what they do. people seem to forget that a Windows installation with no 3rd-party drivers is next to useless. In many cases the NIC, USB and Firewire ports, cardbus, WiFi, Intel-style "fake" RAID, printers, USB broadband modems, and good-old-fashioned dialup modems don't work AT ALL on a fresh Windows installation. With the exception of WiFi, which is a bit spotty due to rapidly-changing proprietary designs, pretty much all that stuff works out of the box on all the major GNU/Linux distributions. Think about it, have you ever had to install chipset drivers on your Linux systems? Nope, it's all in the kernel with any of the major distros.
That fancy 7.1-channel, hardware accelerated sound card doesn't work on Linux, it's true. It doesn't work on Windows either until you install the drivers. If Creative, or Asus, or somebody else released drivers for Linux of the same (generally astonishingly bad, IMO
) quality and frequency that they do for Windows we wouldn't even be thinking about them.It's a catch-22 in a way. In order to have hardware support from the vendors, not just the painstakingly reverse-engineered ones the kernel hackers work so hard to produce for us, we need to have significant marketshare such that by not supporting our preferred platform they are losing business. In order to have sufficient marketshare for that purpose we need to have hardware support.
The market for small, low-powered, quiet computers is going to be huge. Why does Aunt Nellie want a big beige tower humming away under her desk when she can have a cheap 12-15" laptop that's just as fast but portable, quiet, and generally more useful to 90% of the computer-using population who don't give a rat's about upgradability or hardware accelerated 3D performance. Heck, if I could get a 10-12" laptop with a ~1 Ghz Atom, or Geode, or whatever Via's best offering is, or even a non-x86 processor intended for embedded applications (which this is), a human-style keyboard, sub $500-pricing, and a meaty battery good enough for 8+ hours I'd buy it in a heartbeat --and I consider myself something of a power user.
OEM-installed Linux is darn near perfect for these commodity computers, as I'll term them. Dell or HP or Lenovo or whoever worries about making sure that all the hardware works and can put significant pressure on upstream suppliers to pony up with drivers. Let them worry about audio support. Let them worry about ACPI. Let them worry about direct rendering graphics. Heck, they've done it for Windows for years. MS is not in as strong a position as it was a few years ago where it could twist arms on volume OEM licensing, owing largely to the EU's continued hassling.
The market share problem will not be solved until it is easy to get a PC with Linux installed on it by the manufacturer. People need to be honest with potential switchers and help them along. We need to be nice to the OEM's when it's appropriate, which is most of the time. I think Dell got a nice warm welcome and I hope other vendors will see that and consider opening up their product lines a bit more.
The tl;dr version: When OEM's poke the upstream vendors sufficiently hard Linux will have even better hardware support and will enjoy a more dominant position in the marketplace.
Last edited:
