Hacker News Reader

Comment by city41 | Hacker News Reader

That's not a double standard at all. OSX having superior hardware support because it runs in a walled garden on hand picked hardware from Apple themselves is entirely by design and something Apple put a lot of energy, money and dedication into. OSX absolutely should benefit from this over other OSes, as it did not come for free.

View on HN

The author's point is that there IS handpicked hardware from Lenovo (for certain models), by design, and something Intel, among others, put a lot of energy, money and dedication into. Linux absolutely should benefit from this over other OSes, as it did not come for free.

And yet, Linux doesn't have all that great driver support in that handpicked hardware from Lenovo.

Lots of stuff have Win/Mac only drivers.

Do you have any examples please?

Yes, I do.

Most stuff in my field of multimedia, from top notch quality items available for other platforms (Apogee stuff, UAD Apollo, Black Magic Cinema camera) to prosumer products, including many consumer stuff which only have some community drivers that don't let you use all the functionality.

Is that stuff hardware from Lenovo? I am not familiar with any of it but briefly googling it, it does not seem to be.

I think you might be misunderstanding the claim that is being made.

Huh? The claim was just that Linux has good working drivers for the standard Lenovo parts? Trackpad, monitor, GPU, HD controller, sleep/wake-up, etc?

That's barebones basic stuff. Of course that should work out of the box...

It's all the other stuff driver-wise that matters...

That is the claim, and support for that is often claimed to be lacking. The point is that this is false.

I don't think anybody has ever claimed that linux has good support for specialist multi-media hardware.

Yes, that was the claim.

The parallel to your argument is that people should blame Apple for random third-party hardware not working out of the box with OSX.

>The parallel to your argument is that people should blame Apple for random third-party hardware not working out of the box with OSX.

No they shouldn't blame Apple.

But they should give minus points to OS X for "compatibility" when "random third-party hardware does not work out of the box" with it.

And similarly: they should not "blame" Linux for "random third-party hardware not working out of the box" with it, but they should give minus points to Linux in the compatibility department.

You seem to be contradicting yourself, earlier, you said "And yet, Linux doesn't have all that great driver support ..."

Where's the contradiction? Having working trackpad, monitor, fan control, sleep/wake montherboard, soundcard, etc is not "great driver support" -- it's the bare essentials people should expect OUT OF THE BOX.

Support for third party stuff is what makes for "great driver support".

If you pick and choose industries, of course you can shape arguments to suit your favourite OS. How does OSX deal with managing SCADA systems?

Or back when I was in neurology, there was EEG hardware for Win and Lin, but no mac.

I mean, you're responding to "Use lenovo as a reference model" with "looking at a bunch of other suppliers from a niche industry, it doesn't match up". It's not just apples and oranges, it's not even the same ballpark.

A brand-new T430s worked out-of-the box with Arch. Everything came stock in the kernel, and everything worked and still works perfectly.

Maybe this reference list should be more widely available, especially from major vendors like Canonical. Improving the visibility of the list by putting it up on the distro download page would certainly put quite a few minds at ease.

I guess it depends on the used definition of hardware support. Traditionally when I hear hardware support I think of how many devices are supported, not how well are the supported devices supported.

Yeah basically there are two axis of hardware support: breadth (how much hardware is supported) and depth (how well the supported devices are supported).

When people talk about OSX hardware support they tend to talk about depth, Windows or OSX is more breadth.

Though the depth of OSX's hardware support is debatable as well, GPU support has historically been fairly dismal.

Exactly -- and Linux is designed to run on pretty much anything!

This was a stupid article. "Gee, water is wet and sand is dry! (usually)"

I'm willing to pay the premium and always do (willingly), every time I make that upgrade decision.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com