Do you really want developers to be on this list was (Re: Very bad status of hardware (especially wifi) support in ubuntu, due to the too many accumulated regressions)

[Stephan Hermann]

Hi,


On Thu, 2008-11-13 at 09:00 +0000, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote:
> > If a distributor adds more goodies to the kernel, then be happy, but
> > that doesn't mean, that it really works...even when the distributor puts
> > the hardware on the list of supported hardware.
> > 
> 
> I hope this is not really the idea of the ubuntu developers on this 
> topic, because if so, then I can really, really forget all my bugs, and 
> go home happy. If the idea is that a trial-and-error process should be 
> the normal way of using ubuntu (it is the way I use it every time I 
> install it to other people), then just tell me. I think it's 
> unbelievable how far things went in this direction. If this is 
> considered normal and unharmful, there's clearly something that I didn't 
> understand here.

This is reality :) Really.

Example: 

I bought an USB DTV Stick for terrestrial signals.
The product I bought is supported regarding all sources I read
(linuxdvb, kernel...)
So, I bought my hardware, regarding all infos I had access to.

What was the result?

In Hardy, this stick didn't work, just because the hardware vendor
changed one single chip revision. And what now? 

Regarding the Ubuntu Kernel + all other infos, I bought a product, which
just had to work out of the box. 

But reality told me different.

Good, that upstream (those guys from linuxdvb) heard about this issue,
and some guy also had this stick at home and they produced a new driver
release, but this wasn't in time for Hardy.

So, even if you buy hardware which should be supported by any linux
distro out there, because someone put it on a list, you can't be sure,
that it's actually working.

Noone can and will add all different revisions of hardware chip infos on
a list.

What you mostly get is: 

ATI Graphics Card -> supported
NVidia Graphics Card -> Supported
USB DTV Stick Made FooBar -> Supported


And then you will realize, that your very old card is not really
supported anymore, even if it's an ATI or Nvidia...You will even realize
that the new NVidia GeForce 100000 with 8TB of RAM won't be supported,
because the drivers were not finished in time...

And this is nothing which only happens on Ubuntu...this happens all the
time with any other distro, too.

Most likely, if you use server hardware, which doesn't change so many
times over three years than desktop hardware, you will be more happy.

That's why most distros are not supporting a desktop version of their
enterprise release. Because Desktops are really a pain for users and
devs regarding hardware support.

Regards,

\sh