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Comment by wyldfire | Hacker News Reader

Intel has a super good open source reputation, AFAIK.

I'm obviously biased due to dealing with their crap drivers, but intel's reputation always felt to me to be based entirely on "they open sourced and up streamed the code, so we won't talk about how bad it is"

They don't even provide drivers for older devices. Really, can't spare 30MB of storage space to support a perfectly fine product? Thank God for third party websites.

I have a Centrino 6235 Wifi N/Bluetooth adapter, it works just fine except it needs Intel drivers for the Bluetooth part. Their answer seems to be "just upgrade it, lol", suggesting some newer Wifi AC adapters. Higher speeds, they say.

Well, first of all, I won't get anywhere near those speeds for various reasons, and second, why do I have to throw away a perfectly functioning piece of hardware? Ridiculous.

>> why do I have to throw away a perfectly functioning piece of hardware?

Lol. A hardware manufacturer doing things that results in consumers buy more hardware? That's like a software company discontinuing sales of an old OS in order to sell its latest abomination. Intel and MS deserve each others. Toss apple on that pile too imho. Synergy between AMD and linux/foss is a good thing, consumer-friendly behavior that should be encouraged.

Ah, good point. Though this is an adapter that Intel sells to OEMs, in this case HP... And HP does not let you install just any card, it needs to be one that's on their whitelist (embedded in the BIOS).... yeah, all of these companies are pretty bad.

I love bios mods. Replaced a crappy N chip in my Lenovo Yoga with an AC chip.

Thankfully Linux never removes support for old hardware, oh wait.

And they released the documentation for the hardware so you can feel free to join in and make the drivers better any time you like.

Which is about all we can ask of companies doing open source work. And it's still vastly more than most are doing.

They had a series of blunders in the last year but, the drivers (GPU, Ethernet) got stabilized back, it seems.

I've been burned by them, so I experienced the blunders first hand.

Yeah, forgot about that (obviously I meant about how innovative they are in the current market or lack thereof).

And a bad reputation among game developers regarding their GPUs quality.

'Quality' referring to things like stability? Or performance? If the latter, I don't think it's fair to compare intel GPUs with other manufacturers'. Until very recently, intel didn't really compete with AMD/NVIDIA. And if I had to guess, their discrete GPU probably still doesn't have leading performance.

Everything that is relevant for game developers.

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