Hi,
On 07/30/2010 05:47 PM, Shamit Verma wrote:
Is there a technical reason for One Distro having
better hardware
compatibility than other? Given that most drivers are Open Source, should be
easy to build drivers into distro if it is already available for Linux.
Yes, there is a technical reason. Some distros ship drivers which are not
accepted upstream[1], while others don't. The ones who do will have varying
levels of h/w support because eventually these drivers start breaking since
nobody in upstream is looking at them and the maintainers cannot keep up with
the pace of upstream changes to update their drivers. So, something that might
have worked well in the 'horny horse' release of that distro fill start breaking
by the time 'limp leopard' comes out.
Where as those that do work with upstream, do not have to worry, because more
people contribute upstream fixes than to their distro.
cheers,
- steve
[1] because, they ...
a. could contain binary blobs
b. are too unstable
c. are in very early stages of development
d. are provided by a vendor who does not push stuff upstream because they only
release it for certain versions of the kernel
e. do not have an active maintainer
f. are maintained by developers who work for the distro vendor and who are too
lazy to contribute back to upstream
--
random spiel:
http://lonetwin.net/
what i'm stumbling into:
http://lonetwin.stumbleupon.com/