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RE[6]: Window opportuniry
by AdrianoML on Sun 2nd Sep 2012 19:54 UTC in reply to "RE[5]: Window opportuniry"
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You've just said it yourself. Most people don't want to be constantly updating, and they're quite content to have a few years between versions. The bleeding edge is called that for a reason, you know.

If you don't want breakage, use Ubuntu LTS (Just like Google does) or Debian. Fedora is a bleeding edge distro made for linux enthusiasts. Don't try to match bleeding edge systems (like Arch) with "long-term" systems (like Windows).

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you don't do much audio recording or editing, and that you don't use VOIP software to keep in contact with people. Sure, you can play your music through Pulse and usually it will work, but for recording or gaming the latency is just staggering.

Pulseaudio is a very nice sound systems with low latency or (XOR) low power usage in mind. It does not even overlap with Alsa, it actually let's Alsa do what it's good for (kernel/driver handling) and replaces Alsa Userspace, which was really broken and featureless.
And even though the pulseaudio transition was pretty messy, nowadays you're a fool for not using it.

Add to that, drivers are not stable in Linux, by which I mean that I cannot simply download a driver and load it.

That just show how ignorant you are to "the Linux way". You know, they don't need ABI/API stability for drivers because, hey look, 99.999% of all drivers are included inside the kernel (yay score for monolithic kernels), and so every single change they make automatically takes into account these drivers. Just saying that "you can't simply download a driver and load it" shows how much of a Windows mindset you're trying to bring into the Linux world. That will never change for really GOOD reasons.

If you are going to change those internal APIs though, you need to keep the external interfaces the same (a userland for drivers if you will). This is what Windows and OS X do, and guess what, it works.

Guess what, Linux does THE SAME for the external, userland APIs. You can load up programs statically compiled more than 10 years ago, and they will run fine. (look at my Unreal Tournament 99 post) The reason we don't usually do that is because since we already have source code for pretty much everything we can dynamically link everything, reduce RAM/Disk usage, fix bugs and just recompile everything again. That's what distro do and will keep doing.

All the user has to do is download a driver for their version of the os (or the closest available if there isn't one), install it, and go. It's not that simple in Linux and, until it is, no one except developers and corporate IT departments will adopt it.

Again, since 99.999% of drivers come with the kernel, the user does not need to do anything in Linux. It's actually easier. Oh, and the plug 'n play is much faster. Things only get ugly when no driver is available.

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