Re: Write your own drivers? IF THERE IS DEMAND, SELL DRIVERS!
Is there not a *market* for commercially written Linux drivers?
When buying premium machines for ergonomic features, I am valuing those against the cost of employee talent. In the same way NVidia can charge a significant premium for the latest Quadros, if a Surface Studio is what my talent can work better with, I will pay accordingly.
Who commented in the thread about releasing hardware specs, to enable drivers to be written, surely these would be provided, for a price, to a trustworthy outfit.
When NVidia first gave BLOBs, the horse was not so much looked in the mouth, as whipped for not winning the race the new owners so brilliantly rewarded the givers of their gifts. I am afraid Stallman created a poisonous rift in manufacturing a kind of self described evangelist who only was seen by normal folk as disruptive, at best. That resulted in the worst possible marketing for Linux in regular office contexts. Indeed I believe The Year Of Desktop Linux has been poisoned, until the legacy of technical apartheid finally leaves the Linux hordes.
After all, it is high value work. If you can write a good driver for immensely sophisticated hardware, or equally have the deep skills to provide a smooth, seamless, HighDPI UI/UX, you would be questioned hard by your wife, for working for free on such a involved, attention hungry (so family unfriendly) project.
For Linux to be a First Class Citizen, it has to behave more maturely, I believe, than it does now. The culture prohibits necessary growth. Growing up does not just mean the maturity to admit that you will always (in a clear and honest fashion that is obviously a superior management interface or mode human discourse) bawl out your key talent with potty mouthed dismissals. At least BG did that behind closed doors, and he was perennially inseparable from his speccy-spotty youthful image, until recently.
I'll put a price on what I would pay for Linux drivers AND a consistent HighDPI UI: $300.
It is easily worth that, if I or colleagues can work with greater ease with the ergonomics of a computer.
Meanwhile, I genuinely think that Ubuntu will soon enough be a first class citizen, thanks to WSL, for most purposes, on the Windows desktop.
But there are many more capabilities I want to use in Linux, than I believe will ever suit confinement within the NT kernel, because of the kernel accommodations specifically.
I nevertheless broadly agree that Microsoft would do itself a immense favour, in making the Surface Studio a Linux developer machine. Ideally providing a virtualisation in which both Windows and Linux could be pass through guest OSs, as even the free VMWare offering can do, in some hardware configurations. There is even a cachet that would attach to the Studio, in so doing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
