Quoting Steve Litt (slitt@???):

> I agree. The more GNU/Linux blows off prospective users by making them
> jump through hoops, the more Linux becomes a niche. The nichier Linux
> becomes, the more the hardware manufacturers ignore it. Let GNU/Linux
> get up to 25% on the desktop, and the manufacturers will provide good
> drivers for everything they make.

I hope you won't mind my differing strongly with the premise of this
line of reasoning -- and also with its conclusion.

First (as to the conclusion), empirically I find that Linux support for
hardware is quite good, and on balance better than it was in olden days.
But that's the lesser point I wanted to make: The larger is that you're
ignoring a huge difference between proprietary and open-source operating
systems, and also a unique advantage that Microsoft Corporation enjoys
(control of the OEMs via coop marketing) for its OSes.

Microsoft offers to hardware manufacturers (as does Apple and the other
surviving proprietary Unix companies) the huge advantage of them
furnishing (generally buggy, poorly documented, difficult or impossible
to maintain) driver code with the source provided, if at all, under NDA.
This is a motivator because hardware manufacturers tend to regard
detailed information about their hardware, such as would be exposed by
source-available drivers, as a closely held trade secret. (Moreover,
it's known that some such manufacturers outsource driver authorship to
other firms as one-off contract work, and end up lacking expertise --
and sometimes lacking source code.)

Linux _could_ offer the same attraction -- through the tiny little ;->
change of abandoning open source. Absent that abandonment of our
founding principles, a sizeable percentage of Linux hardware drivers get
created using reverse-engineering with little or no manufacturer
cooperation. The number of Linux desktop users has no effect on this
dynamic.

The unique advantage Microsoft has is its 'coop marketing' program:
favoured OEMs' advertising costs are very heavily subsidised by
Microsoft Corporation, forming a very significant percentage of revenues
of goods sold. This perpetuate the preload monopoly, and ensures that
hardware manufacturers are motivated to keep hurling driver code over
the transom to stay in the game (even though the resulting code usually
sucks) without Microsoft needing to do any work. And, again, desktop
headcount has zero effect on this dynamic.

I can hazard a guess about why I keep hearing this 'desktop mindshare'
argument with no recognition of the vital differences that make it
pretty much inapplicable: It's a leftover, reflexive proprietary-OS way of
thinking (or, to be blunt, of not thinking). Free your mind, Steve. ;->