Fabrice Facorat: Linux ready for Desktop ? of course not !

Wow es epidemico esto :-P no no me parece que sea cierto lo que se ve reflejado en estos post es la falta de flexibilidad no de linux sino de un mercado que no provee drivers abiertos.

Fabrice Facorat: Linux ready for Desktop ? of course not ! - [EN] I've read with interest Vincent Danen post on his blog about the difficulties he had to setup an ATI card.
While i know this could be easier and that didn't correctly do the things, I do agree however with his conclusion : Linux is not ready for the Desktop.
For me when you have control over the environnement and the hardware, linux is ready : think servers, workstations, thin clients, kiosk. However when you have no control on the hardware, Linux is not ready because it somewhat lacks of flexibility. This could sound wrong as Linux is running on many plateform, but the issue is not about supporting many plateforms or supporting a wide range of hardware ( from phone to router to PC to blade ... ), it's about allowing to easily support a new hardware for which the OS was not designed to work on it initially ( or to work with ).
Let me clarify what i mean.
Under Windows
Under Windows, you bought the card, install the driver from the CD in a graphical way ( Accept -> next -> next -> reboot ) and normally it's working and thus even if you're using Win2k ( 6 years old ) or WinXP SP1 ( 3 years old ).
As Windows API is mostly stable, it's easy for 3rd party people to support the plateform and thus even 3 years later
Under Linux
Now do the same thing with a Linux distribution dating from 3 years with a modern hardware ... even when you have opensource drivers ( think for example I,ntel chipset ), It may not work.
In this case you need to update the kernel or Xorg ( in fact migrating from Xfree to Xorg ). But unless you have backports packages, you will need to compil from scratch or upgrade all your system to the latest distribution version.
Please note that devfs was removed in kernel 2.6.17, so if you upgrade from 2.4 or 2.6.5 kernel and you were using devfs ...
Now this is the simpliest case : with opensource drivers. Now when having proprietary drivers, it's even worst because :

• you will need to have kernel source code ( kernel-source ) eventually
• hope this driver will support your old kernel ( i.e this drivers may need to support sometimes 10 differents API because kernel API is not stable/fixed ), etc ...
• Also be sure about glibc/gcc/others applications version

Do you remember Windows or Mac way ? Accept -> next -> next -> reboot
Of course if you have the latest distro version with the latest software ( kernel, xorg, ... ), you may have support support even for your latest hardware. But maybe in 1 year you will have to upgrade to a new version of the distro because you decide to upgrade your hardware.
The monolithic approach in Linux/BSD is interesting because all drivers are already integrated and as they are in a common place, they may have better review. However this system lacks of flexibility. unfortunately in the desktop environment people need flexibility because you have no control over what kind of hardware they will try to use ...
So Linux is not ready for mass consumer desktop PC. However people with enough knowledges can use Linux on desktop. [Planet Mandriva]