Rick Moen <rick@???> wrote:

>> 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 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. ;->

I think you are both right (in part) and both wrong (in part) !

Rick, you more or less support Steve's argument in your rebuttal. For Windows, device manufacturers provide the drivers because without that they don't get to play in the big pond - and without playing in the big pond, they have no business. Because Linux is a little pond (or even puddle, in their eyes), they don't have to care.
So we have, to an extent, a chicken and egg situation. In part, Linux adoption is held back by it's perceived difficulty - such as having to go and find drivers for your hardware. In part, the reason for that is that device manufacturers don't provide drivers/support development of them. In part, the reason for not providing/supporting drivers is that they don't see/care about the "little pond" that is Linux users and so don't see a business driver to do it.

If there were lots more Linux users, and lots less Windows users, then that situation would change. There'd be a louder voice for them to hear of "if you want us to buy your devices, you need to provide the drivers (or support their development)" - and so there'd be a business case for doing just that. There's a difference between the business case spending money to add (say) 5% to your potential market vs spending that money to add (say) 30% to the potential market.

But even that is, in part, irrelevant. When you have things like a dominant player (Microsoft) actively forcing (video) device manufacturers to make their products more fragile and harder to reverse engineer. As I read the situation, if a video card manufacturer wants to play in the Microsoft world of "trusted video paths" then they have to build something that is fundamentally at odds with having good open source drivers available - they have to purposefully make things more fragile by detecting attempts to "look into" the internals and "breaking" if anything does something "not approved" such as trying different things to see what they do (as in part of reverse engineering a driver).