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Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

Hardware support is by far the stupidest complaint that prevails when people talk about operating systems. Choose your hardware for your software, not the other way around. There are so many better things operating system authors have to do than to implement thousands of competing proprietary hardware interfaces. Mature support for even 50% of consumer hardware would take a massive team of full time engineers years to pull off, and would be wasted when that team could have been making huge strides and innovations in the parts of the OS that actually matter.

If your hardware isn't supported and you don't like it, get your ass into the code and build support for it.

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When you say "choose your hardware for your software", you are assuming the software has already been chosen by the time the hardware is selected. That's not necessarily the case. I already have the hardware, it's been bought years ago, and it works with the software I use. Now if for instance I wanted to evaluate OpenSolaris, but it didn't run on the hardware I have, I would probably pass it up. I wouldn't invest hours and hours coding support for it to run on my hardware, before I were sure I would have a use for it. And that's assuming I could; I do happen to know how to write a low-level driver, but many people who would otherwise be interested on the software might not have that knowledge and/or ability.

Of course, once you already use the software, the situation inverts itself. I do choose only hardware which is known to work well with Linux, since that's the operating system I use, and I have even ported a device driver when that wasn't the case. But that can only happen because, many years ago when I first tried Linux, it worked perfectly with the hardware I had.

I think that this argument holds up, but fails to justify the huge engineering cost of supporting large amounts of proprietary consumer hardware.

If you want to evaluate it but don't have the hardware, try qemu.

What kind of domain are you in that allows you to migrate code to random operating systems with such ease? In any case, I would be skeptical if changing OSs mid-business was the common case. More likely, I'd guess people choose the software stack before the hardware, based on their own experience, advice from others and/or other external factors (requirement to run existing applications, etc).

If you wanted to evaluate it, surely you'd use a virtual machine?

Illumos has a lot of nice features I'd like to use. But my product is a small low power ARM device and I'd run out of money long before I'd finish adding minimal ARM support to illumos.

Things are not as simple as you suggest.

Minimal ARM support would probably be pretty easy. 3 or 4 weekends tops.

Hardware support is by far the stupidest complaint that prevails when people talk about operating systems. Choose your hardware for your software, not the other way around.

Amen to that!

> . Choose your hardware for your software, not the other way around.

Oh, look at Mr "I don't need to use what's laying around" over here.

It's a lesson one learned fairly quickly in the late 1980's and early-to-mid 1990's on the Commodore Amiga. Since then, I've always chosen my hardware for my software, because software is infinitely more important than the hardware: even the most powerful hardware is utterly useless without the software to enable one to get work done.

Always choose your hardware for your software, never the other way around.

My point is that you often don't get that luxury.

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