I’ve been in a fortunate position this past year of having some extra money to throw at shiny new hardware and I’ve experienced a side of Linux I haven’t dealt with before…its poor support for shiny new hardware.
I grabbed a Ryzen 9000 CPU and an X870 motherboard…only to find that ethernet didn’t work on kernel 6.11. I had to use a usb-c to ethernet dongle for several weeks until 6.13 released.
Just today and what prompted this post, I splurged on a 4k 240hz HDR monitor. HDR is obviously in-progress and I did not expect it to work out of the box. Critically, what I did expect was for the 240hz part to work, but I couldn’t set it to anything beyond 120. Skip forward a couple hours, and I now know what EDID files are and how to use different ones. For more insight on my night, see this issue, this blog post, and this blog post. After all that, 240hz is smooth, goddamn.
For me, I’m not complaining. I love desktop Linux far more than shiny new hardware. I would return this monitor before considering not using Linux, and in the latter case it was a good chance to learn more about how Linux deals with display devices.
But I’m also one of many people here who wants to see desktop Linux become more popular, and if a regular person encountered either of those issues, they’re going straight back to Windows. While that monitor issue has been fixed upstream, it’s still broken in an up-to-date distro like Fedora and the monitor is over 6 months old at this point.
When it comes to stuff like HDR, that’s obviously progressing quickly and is likely to become a non-factor in the future. But new ethernet controllers and new monitors with invalid DisplayIDs are likely always going to be coming out. Unless you’re willing to tinker, your only option is to wait weeks or months before buying the new shiny thing if you want to use Linux.
That brings me to my question, is there a future where this isn’t the case? And what would be required to get there?
Do motherboard/monitor/IC/etc manufactures need to submit their own kernel patches well in advance of product releases, like what AMD and Intel do for their CPUs and GPUs? Are we just waiting for them to give a shit?
Is there any possibility of hardware support-related patches getting backported to older kernel versions sooner rather than waiting for new major releases?
This is kind of an ungooglable question, and I figured it might make for an interesting discussion topic if anyone has more insight or thoughts on this.
Could the kernel makers create some sort of sandbox to run Windows drivers in - so we ride on Windows coat tails until true Linux drivers are available? Or is the Windows, um DPI (driver program interface) just too different to allow that?
Edit: Then we use the Windows drivers an make loud noises to the hardware mfg that we would really rather have a Linux driver and that they would sell many more of their $hardware if they make one.
I’d argue that would make even less of an incentive for manufacturers to make Linux drivers.
We are already kind of seeing that in the gaming space. Why bother making a native Linux port if it works fine enough on Proton/Wine. We effectively end up with Win32/Linux
Doing it ourselves might have the same effect though - “oh well, they have their own driver they are happy with”
Bring back the good old days of ndiswrapper.
I wasn’t around that early, was ndiswrapper, bad?
Not really, it generally worked in the end - so in fact it’s pretty great actually at getting you out of a hole.
It was just a load of extra steps - and usually a last resort after failing with whatever came on the installation disks. So morale had taken a few hits before you even started with it.
Everything is easier when you can connect to the network immediately.
Fair play to ubuntu (and i guess kernel improvements in early 2ks) - that was such a major step in ease of installation.