Why does Linux adoption on the desktop have to be so difficult? Windows users are used to wanting thing to ‘just work’. This isn’t always easy in Linux as much as I hate to admit it. Especially when dealing with drivers for hardware. You have to make sure you are buying the right device/card and it will operate with your Linux Distribution. Unfortunately, this takes a little research and more than a basic understanding of computer internals. Your basic A+ certified tech can’t do much beyond windows so it’s more than beyond your average user’s capabilities.
This leaves Linux in the hands of the technically savvy, which is possibly where it belongs. However, the net effect of this is that the technically savvy is a smaller market and the Joe SixPack user segment clearly has priority when new hardware is created such as printers and nice, shiny, new laptops that are all the colors of the rainbow.
But what the industry seems to forget is that it was the technically savvy, the ‘power users’, of the overall market that drove the desire to improve systems. An evolution in software is not something they are used to. The manufacturers like to make new graphics cards and new processors and fully expect the OS to remain the same old version it’s always been. Typically the divergence of operating systems makes hardware devices harder to create and support. However, cards are intelligent enough now to handle a lot of their own resource management and processing and should need very little from drivers these days. But in order to keep costs down the companies tend to put a lot of the grunt work back into drivers and it’s easier to work on drivers for windows than Linux.
Is there a way past this cycle of least-common-denominator computing where the worst of the masses is the most supported? I don’t know what the solution is. Whatever the solution I can imagine quite a bit of whining and moaning (lawsuits) when it starts to be put into place.
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