Being at the bleeding edge can hurt sometimes, especially when you're not talking in terms of software. In this instance I am talking about software and hardware, however.
Not 1 month ago I built myself a new machine to replace my previous desktop, which fell to pieces. Unfortunately in my haste not to work at the work laptop for longer than I had to, I set about buying the kit, not taking much thought into the support within linux for each item.
As Christmas and New Year subsided, and work became manageable I turned to making the 3rd partition on this beast into my "regular" (ubuntu or debian) desktop - rather than the work and gaming one, which is Windows. Unfortunately it appears I've made some fatal errors in choosing my hardware;
- GA-965P-S3: Any 965 chipset requires kernel version 2.6.16, or better, for network drivers and various chipset and dual core enhancements. Many recommend 2.6.18. That limits me to Debian Unstable (Sid), Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, Gentoo, or a custom build immediately. I really can't be arsed with Gentoo, or making a custom build when Feisty or Sid are available.
- FakeRaid: I chose to use "fakeraid" (on board hardware RAID0). This requires the dmraid package in order to see my logical hard drive. Bugger. Only Fedora and Gentoo have this by default in their installer. Not a problem though, as there are ways aroud this; either loading the package once the installer is running, or installing from a LiveCD, and loading the dmraid package first.
- Creative X-Fi (Platinum): No drivers available, nor expected from Creative until "second quarter 2007". I cannot live without music. Yes I could use onboard, but its crap, and loading up my MP3 player defeats the point of having a nice soundcard + the breakout box. I hope that some kind soul who knows more about writing drivers than myself can at least resolve some basic functionality. I could live without the remote, honestly!
- eVGA GeForce7900GS: Requires proprietary drivers for reasonable speeds and "twinview" - which makes updating, etc. "fun" on occasion.
Now the proprietary graphics drivers I could live with (yes, I'm donating to the nouveau effort) for a while. However, the lack of sound will truly drive me up the wall.
So who's fault is it? Mine? The hardware manufacturers? Any member of the FL/OSS movement? Potentially I agree it's partially my fault for not being more careful at what hardware I chose, despite being in a rush, I should've thought it through more. But surely it's the manufacturers (specifically Creative) responsibility to let me use the hardware that I've paid for? Arguably you can say that it's not a supported OS, why should they bow to me? The reason is, that at the end of the day I put [a little amount] money into that company, whilst I don't have the right to tell them what they should do, they should be aware that after being stung once, I'm far more likely to vote with my feet and take my custom elsewhere. After all, with so many people doing it, and at any ever increasing rate (just take a look at your local LUG mailing list to see how many people ask for linux friendly laptop distribution these days), isn't it in their best interests?
And this is pretty much exactly why LINUX ain't any popular than it is now. Imagine any pleb trying to do a lets say Red Hat install on either new PC ! They'd be soo stuffed it'd be funny.
Personly I blame the manufacturers, they should write the drivers for the products. But then why bother as Windows aint that bad and thus LINUX ain't taken over the world.
Redhat installers tend to be much better than the debian or ubuntu, etc. counterparts - as they are actually graphical these days, and as I said the fact that they include dmraid by default actually makes it easier. It's purely the lack of a recent kernel in the current releases thats holding redhat back from being easily installable on my hardware (ignoring the soundcard for the moment).
However, the fact that I'd rather use debian, or any of its derivatives makes my life somewhat more tricky. But it's not particularly difficult.
Just like a "regular" user wouldn't feel confident installing Windows, many people don't feel confident installing linux distros - yet I think (aside from hardware quirks), it's actually easier. The only complicated bit is really partitioning, which isn't exactly easy to start off with. You even get easy to pick options (blow the whole disk away, use the largest amount of free space, or manual) - which is something Windows could learn from imho.