[ Thanks to jhansonxi for this link.
]
“The lack of iPod & iTunes support on Linux is not a bug
solved by the kernel alone, but Step 1 of Linux World Domination is
World Installation. Software incompatibilities will be better
solved as soon as the hardware incompatibilities become better
solved. The only problem you can’t work around is a hardware
problem.“If you hit a kernel bug, it is quite possible the rest of the
free software stack cannot be used. That is generally not the case
for other software. Fixing kernel bugs faster will increase the
pace of Linux desktop adoption, as each bug is a potential barrier.
If you assume 50M users running Linux and each bug typically
affects 0.1 percent of those users, that is 10’s of thousands of
people. Currently, the Linux kernel has 1,700 active bugs. Ubuntu
has 76,371 bugs. I think bug count goals of some kind would be
good.“In general, Linux hardware support for the desktop is good, but
it could be better and get better faster. From Intel, to Dell, to
IBM and Lenovo, to all of their suppliers, the ways in which they
are all over-investing in the past at the expense of the future
should be clear; the Linux newswires document them in detail on a
daily basis. I was told by an Intel engineer that his company
invests 1 percent of the resources into Linux as it does to
Windows. It is only because writing Linux drivers is so much easier
that Intel is seen as a quite credible supporter of it. The few
laptops by Dell that even ship with Linux still contain proprietary
drivers, drivers that aren’t in the kernel, and so forth.”