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Comment by petepete | Hacker News Reader

Have any hardware companies ever written good accompanying software? From all the custom-ui graphics card config nonsense to utilities that phone home of their own accord, to things like this which are laughably awful.

I feel glad I left for the mild shores of Linux in the early 00s.

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Apple?

Could I draw your attention to iTunes for Windows?

Note that the grandparent said: Have any hardware companies ever written good accompanying software?

I think this should be read as an existential quantification. Sure, not all Apple software is great, but for a hardware company Apple has made a lot of great software (or: for a software company, Apple has made a lot of awesome hardware).

iTunes for Windows is hot garbage

They want you to buy a Mac. It's likely somewhat intentional.

iTunes for Mac is slightly less-hot garbage.

They need to refactor the monolithic app that does everything into smaller, more focused apps. My media player shouldn't also do document management for my phone.

I didn't use iTunes for Windows, but I did use one for Mac a couple of times. I can imagine how terrible the Windows one must be if it's worse than the garbage they ship for Mac. No use case I needed from it was ever easy or worked as I wanted...

It’s equal opportunity garbage - iTunes on Mac is also awful :)

I'd argue that Apple are a hardware and software company - the unison of the two has been central to much of their success.

Configuring an Airport Express was always painful.

As someone who's had used iTunes on Windows, many, many years ago (And MacOS9 before that), Apple software 'quality' is a special circle of hell.

When I first started using Linux, I was annoyed that I couldn't customize my Corsair keyboard lights and layout, so I swapped it for a Poker II that lets you do everything directly on the board through keypresses and store settings onboard. So much better.

Yeah, because on Linux the community has to support the hardware because the manufacturer doesn't even bother. Sounds way better...

I would like to inform you that it does in fact work really rather well. I write this on a laptop running Debian Linux which I use for work. It's great.

I also use a machine running Debian Linux for my personal computing needs, but prefer to separate those concerns a bit. I can confirm the community's support is excellent though.

Actually the support from community is often much better than from the vendor. Especially for the older hardware, which works perfectly fine, but just have no drivers for modern Windows.

The main problem with hardware support in Linux is there is no up-to-date source of information about what works and what doesn't (and everything in between). You can usually find info about particular piece of hardware, but it lacks the main purpose of such a database - to make more people to buy more open hardware.

It doesn't work at all, for the thousands of pieces of hardware that simply don't work on Linux, or work poorly.

Further, it doesn't work at all from an economics standpoint. There is zero incentive driving the community to support every iteration of every type of hardware other than personal need, and if you're suggesting that anyone who needs something has to go out and build a driver themselves, please let me know who your dealer is because I want to be as high as you.

As for, "the community is better than the manufacturer" try having an outage over the holidays, and see how your community reacts to, "help me or my business fails".

I see your _thousands_ of pieces of hardware that don't work and raise you all the hardware written for old versions of Windows whose drivers no longer work on new versions yet still work _perfectly_ on Linux.

See: professional audio and video gear, perfectly good network cards.

You need to match my bet in order to raise it, and you didn't even come remotely close.

Also, note in my post I referred specifically to 'accompanying software'. Drivers that work with the OS in question are to be expected in the commercial software world.

So many hardware companies fell into the trap of making steaming piles like ATI's CCC[0], Creative's SoundBlaster Control Panel[1], ASUS's Control erm.. thing[2]. And it's not just gaming peripherals, buy a computer from HP and see how many HP-specific utilities clog up the system tray. Same goes for most of the other big players.

I just want the OS and the drivers thanks.

[0] https://www.screenshots-archive.com/ati-catalyst-control-cen...

[1] https://i.imgur.com/POZVXQj.jpg

[2] https://img.purch.com/o/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubGFwdG9wbWFnLmNvbS9p...

> As for, "the community is better than the manufacturer" try having an outage over the holidays, and see how your community reacts to, "help me or my business fails".

And for those people there are companies like Canonical, who derive their product from Debian. There is also Redhat, SUSE, etc. Lots of commercial options grow up around these vibrant communities to fill the gaps that they sometimes leave. This is an unmitigatedly good thing.

OpenBSD's official FAQ has this to say about Flash:

Adobe's Flash plugin is distributed in binary form only, and they do not provide a native OpenBSD version. Considering their security record, we thank them for this neglect.

The situation is equivalent here; given the kind of software that hardware manufacturers tend to write, I'm quite happy to take volunteer efforts over what they produce.

Every BSD system I’ve used never had X installed, let alone a web-browser - but now I’m curious what a text-mode Flash player would be like.

You don't need X to browse web. There's Lynx.

There's also AAlib, which could help with rendering in text mode.

Maybe your use case didn't involve X, but BSDs do make a decent (graphical) desktop.

I'm actually struggling to find any kind of comprehensive list, but I'll point out that I've used Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA first-party drivers in Linux over the years. I'm sure there are countless others.

"Sounds way better..."

Because it is.

Name one, just one, hardware manufacturer you can reach by email to report a bug and expect both your mail to be replied and the bug to be fixed. And without being charged a dime in the process (well deserved yet voluntary donations aside). No thanks, I'll stay with the Linux community any day.

It's not, not even remotely. You clearly haven't actually lived day-to-day with Linux or you'd know how buggy and unreliable the random drivers for less-than-popular hardware actually is.

Further, you've clearly never had a critical outage happen during off hours. Try running to the community when your job is on the line at 3AM Christmas Day, let me know how responsive they are to you then.

You get the quality you pay for, and while the open source community is wonderful and amazing, it's done by people working for free, and subject to the whims of those people, which makes it A) unreliable B) inconsistent, and C) lower quality, on average.

"Try running to the community when your job is on the line at 3AM Christmas Day"

That's a bit extreme. Of course throwing a shitload of money at support contracts will give you helpdesks answering during holidays and drones flocking into the data center, but that applies only to a very small subset of hw/sw products where any outage can be fatal. The consumer market is just a bit different though.

It's the opposite of extreme, it's reality for every company out there, and it's not a "very small subset" it's the majority of money.

Besides, if your shit can't work when it counts, what good is it?

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