this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Again, I think you're mistaken here. The majority of linux devs are not working on reverse engineering device drivers here. They work on their own projects within the linux ecosystem. Working on reverse engineering a device is a hard work and volunteers won't do it except for a few very dedicated people like asahi linux devs. Rallying behind a single distro won't fix this unless the distro is made by a huge company willing to pay people to reverse engineers various drivers. Getting essential hardware works is important and that's where most volunteers device driver devs are working with, but I'm not convinced getting support for all devices in the market the best way forward simply because it takes too many manpower we don't actually have. Better spend that manpower on getting gnome and kde better, getting wayland better, or perhaps maintaining x11 again, etc.
Linux desktop marketshare wasn't even 1% with no growth in sight until relatively recently, so yeah, off course people are celebrating now. It's now comparable to Mac marketshare (~4%) in early 2010.
I'm just telling you that it's wrong to assume hardware support problem will be solved by unifying behind a single distro, while in reality device driver devs are already unified behind the linux kernel project (not distro projects) and there is not enough manpower because there are only a handful of devs have necessary skill and willing to donate their time to support random devices in the market (and they need to have the devices on their hands first for reverse engineering). As linux marketshare grows, device manufacturers may be willingly support linux on their own, so your future scanner might eventually work out of the box on linux.