Hi,
On 07/30/2010 05:47 PM, Shamit Verma wrote:
Is there a technical reason for One Distro having better hardware compatibility than other? Given that most drivers are Open Source, should be easy to build drivers into distro if it is already available for Linux.
Yes, there is a technical reason. Some distros ship drivers which are not accepted upstream[1], while others don't. The ones who do will have varying levels of h/w support because eventually these drivers start breaking since nobody in upstream is looking at them and the maintainers cannot keep up with the pace of upstream changes to update their drivers. So, something that might have worked well in the 'horny horse' release of that distro fill start breaking by the time 'limp leopard' comes out.
Where as those that do work with upstream, do not have to worry, because more people contribute upstream fixes than to their distro.
cheers, - steve
[1] because, they ... a. could contain binary blobs b. are too unstable c. are in very early stages of development d. are provided by a vendor who does not push stuff upstream because they only release it for certain versions of the kernel e. do not have an active maintainer f. are maintained by developers who work for the distro vendor and who are too lazy to contribute back to upstream