What Linux needs 13529

Aragorn

True, that's part of the problem, but even when these drivers are released, you either have to compile them from source, hope they were included with your distribution, or hope there's a pre-compiled package for your specific kernel version.

That's not what I'm saying. All I'm saying is that Linux should have some kind of interface to binary-only drivers built into the kernel that only changes with major releases. That way a company can release one binary driver for all 2.6 kernels that just works. Correct me if I'm wrong, but FreeBSD has something like this, doesn't it?

A lot of people will disagree with you. The Linux desktop shows a lot of promise, even for novice users, if just a few ease of use barriers are removed. KDE and Gnome have done a great job at giving users a point-and-click way to do most things, and by the way, you don't have to use them if you don't want to.

I know it supports a lot. Most hardware does work out of the box. All I'm saying is that if it's not supported by the plain valilla tree or patches included in your distro, and there's no pre-compiled package for your kernel verson, your only option is to build from source. This wouldn't be so bad if there were no dependencies to worry about in doing this and it always just amounted to a simple make, make install. However, when half the time you get some cryptic error message, that's just not friendly to even the most advanced non-developer user.

Then why is there so much talk about the possibility of it making inroads into the desktop market? Why has so much effort gone into Gnome and KDE, which have already solved most of the deskop-user friendliness problems once present in Linux? Why have companies like Red Hat and Suse invested so many resources making Linux easier to install? The point is that you might not see Linux as a potential strong desktop OS, but a lot of people do and in my opinion there are just a few barriers to this becoming a reality, which is what the original post was intended to highlight.

Yes and if the space shuttle were intended to be used by the mbuttes, if NASA felt that this was true in the same way that plenty of companies feel that Linux should be usable by the mbuttes on a desktop, there would be an automatic gearshift.