Il giorno ven, 15/05/2009 alle 16.34 +0200, Markus Hitter ha scritto: > > As popularity increases, more vendors will attempt to provide > drivers > at launch dates of new hardware. For now it's a reasonable strategy > to buy hardware which is at least half a year old or which is binary > compatible with such older hardware. >
Unfortunately, this is sometimes the worst advice to give. It seems to me that in some cases both ubuntu and upstream silently, unconsciously, collectively agree that old hardware should just die. Let me explain it better: it is frequently the case that such hardware gets broken across a release and remains broken for the whole release; in next release something gets adjusted and something else typically gets broken. The living proof is my laptop (toshiba tablet m400) whose entire hardware is claimed to be supported since at least 3 years. And it is, in fact, once you fiddle with the software. Since Dapper I NEVER saw an ubuntu release into which everything worked out of the box on this laptop. In EVERY release something was repaired, but something else regressed to broken. I reported all the regressions during alphas or sometimes betas, but in some cases there is just no need to get either ubuntu's or upstream's attention on certain regressions. This also holds for external hardware. I have an external network card, bought upon frustration after iwl3945 _replaced_ ipw3945, breaking it with my home router, and nobody in ubuntu cared to consider forward port of the drivers. Well, in hardy upgrades at some point it stopped working and the situation on the bts is some strange open->duplicate->fix released loop. I still have to find time to understand what happened (but from intrepid on the card works). Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
