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Comment by fauigerzigerk | Hacker News Reader

Seeing so many chip makers up there on the list makes me wonder about the state of Linux drivers. Why is it that Android and Chrome OS and Windows can make drivers actually work, but Linux on laptops will still predictably run hot and drain the battery like crazy?

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Because the hardware and OS companies are working together on this, and the hardware doesn't ship until it works in its target OS. In Linux, volunteers are poking around blindly tryign to get the hardware to do what they ask while the hardware vendor has all the information and isn't sharing it.

That's what I used to think but now that I see that there are that many chip makers contributing I'm starting to wonder. But it's probably as varikin says, they're working on different kinds of drivers.

Much of the hardware for the higher end Android devices is composed of stuff from a handful of OEMs, so that also helps. Also many of the devices that come out around the same time are using at least some identical components.

SoCs are all mostly Qualcomm or Samsung, radio chipsets are mostly Qualcomm, LCDs are Sony/Samsung/Sharp/LG and a few others, AMOLED are all Samsung as far as I know, GPUs are mostly Qualcomm/PowerVR/Nvidia.

Much of the time, the Android modding community ports newer versions of Android to other devices simply by hoping some OEM releases a newer version of Android for another device that happens to have some identical hardware component so they can either drop that particular driver into the other device or tweak it a bit. Porting the OS is never really the problem. The problems generally lie in outdated proprietary drivers no longer working with the newer version of Android (Camera/Bluetooth/Radio/sometimes GPU are the most likely candidates to break).

I would expect the chip makers are putting more effort into getting server hardware working than consumer. Thing such as raid cards, high end network cards, motherboards, etc. Also possibly for dedicated off the shelf appliances the routers and such not. The types of things that are not cost efficient for minimizing to a laptop or commodity hardware.

Microsoft have lots of driver issues too: hardware manufacturers build buggy drivers that break Windows. They're making progress on this via WHQL and Windows Logo labelling. Unfortunately it's not obvious that a "Works on Linux" logo scheme will have much effect without wider consumer adoption (which, in classic chicken/egg fashion, is hindered by shonky drivers)!

Because Linux is fundamentally flawed.

Apparently not too flawed to take over the server market and the mobile space.

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