Very bad status of hardware (especially wifi) support in ubuntu, due to the too many accumulated regressions

[Bryce Harrington]

On Sun, Nov 09, 2008 at 03:53:55PM -0500, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> On Sunday 09 November 2008 15:07, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote:
> ...
> > network. Some of them work in a release, some of them in another. In the
> > end, you never see your laptop "just working" in a single release.
> 
> Oddly enough, for me, my Dell Latitude D430 laptop (not one of the ones that 
> is pre-sold with Ubuntu) has 'just worked' in Gutsy, Hardy, and Intrepid.  
> 
> I don't doubt you've had problems, but it's not safe to over-generalize.

Agreed about over-generalizing.

That said, I do like generalizing.  :-)  I think there is a cyclical
thing in FOSS, where you have some legacy thing that works 80%, and
upstream decides to get that last 20% it requires a major rewrite.  They
expect it to get to 90-95%, so distros adopt it, but when the dust
settles it works at just 85%...

...and unfortunately the 15% it doesn't cover is different than the 20%
the legacy system didn't cover, and that 15% is rightfully pissed that
they are seeing a regression when things worked so well before.

Bryce