Myths, Lies, and Truths about the Linux kernel

This past summer at OLS Greg Kroah-Hartman (a Linux kernel hacker) held a keynote speech called Myths, Lies, and Truths about the Linux kernel. This is a really great keynote and very much worth reading.

One of the myth he is talking about is hardware support. The fact of today is that there is no OS that supports as much hardware as Linux does. That is really quite amazing. My experience is pretty good in regards to support in Linux. Linux isn't perfect though as there are hardware on which Linux fails. The few areas where Linux still have problems is wifi, videocards and laptops. Who is to blame for these problems? Often Linux is given the blame, but this is actually wrong. The real part to blame is the companies making these products. The least these companies could do was to release the specifications for the hardware they sell. That would make it possible for the Linux developers to create drivers for it. The obvious thing to do is of course to not buy hardware from these companies. This is not always possible, but the laptop I bought recently is a good example: I bought a laptop with Intel graphics instead of ATI or NVIDIA since Intel provides open source drivers where the others don't. ATI and NVIDIA provides proprietary drivers for Linux, but that is simply just not good enough. In fact, those drivers are illegal and unethical! Read the keynote speech and you'll understand why.