Watch Linux video go the way of Linux audio... Intel are 100% in the right to make a stand.
Linux audio just works. There's a single userspace API (PulseAudio), a single kernel driver API (ALSA), and all the old nastiness of the '90s (ESD, aRts, OSS) is dead and gone.
In contrast, getting video to work properly involves figuring out what hardware you're running (nVidia? ATI/AMD? Intel? misc other?), then hunting down the drivers, installing them, rebooting, hoping the hardware gets detected correctly, and so on until the user gives up and settles for a half-broken system. I consider myself fairly skilled with Linux stuff, and I still can't figure out how to get my desktop to have both kernel modesetting and accelerated OpenGL at the same time.
Then there's the hardware-specific fun: headphone outputs that don't mute the speakers when they should due to driver or hardware quirks, outputs and inputs that plain don't work, weird volume glitches where exiting one app causes all the others to shift in volume due to PulseAudio's info about the hardware volume control being wrong...
I just buy the hardware I want, assume it will work, and find that it does. Maybe I've been getting lucky, but I don't think so.
The only real remaining pain in the ass is printer support, but who the hell uses printers these days?
With my ATI graphics card on my desktop I have a script that runs on startup to force the display drive to to detect my 1920x1080 monitor otherwise it displays the screen with big black bars all around the edges.
Audio and video are still a pita for me.
sudo amdconfig --set-pcs-val=MCIL,DigitalHDTVDefaultUnderscan,0Even then, if you stick to ALSA applications, you'll have a few issues:
1) You're going to be limiting yourself to a lot less possibilities (Skype uses Pulse, IIRC, for example)
2) You can't have simple settings such as per-application volume control.
Sure it "just works", but it does if you use a set of programs which only the people who say "it just works" (a lot of people, I know) restrict themselves to. While it may work for you, different people have different needs.
I'm still waiting for the day Linux audio (and video, but less hopeful because of proprietary drivers) simply works in the same way it does under Windows/Mac.
Footnote: I completely forgot to mention latency issues, which is awful for audio processing.
Can't say I've ever noticed Pulse latency, even while playing Quake, except when using Pulse's networking features. Maybe I have crude ears.
It may not represent the typical Linux users, but while audio processing also doesn't represent the typical PC user, it works under mainstream operating systems. Until such a simple thing also "just works", I won't be happy with sound on Linux.
Basically, I'm from the group of people who want things to work on Linux for the same use cases they work on mainstream OSs before I state that it "just works". I believe saying things "just work" only because it works for most of my needs is detrimental, as it gives a wrong image and may frustrate people trying to do something different , as it has happened to me in the past, I've caught myself trying to do non-standard things a lot (read: most) of the time.
There's a ton of Windows applications that take over audio and do a lot of driver weirdness. There's still ASIO incompatibilies, latency issues, etc. In fact it happens in the same space where PulseAudio and JACK intersect on Windows.
Wasted a whole day at work with that one. The nVidia drivers don't support framebuffer consoles, only VGA, but UEFI doesn't provide VGA console I/O. And an encrypted disk needs human interaction to type the password in at bootup, meaning some kind of graphical support. Meanwhile, the non-proprietary drivers crash the X server if you so much as jiggle a window about.
Your best bet with desktop Linux is still to buy old, cheap, common-denominator hardware. Anything recent is a gamble unless you're very technically adept or have access to professionals.
Not with proprietary drivers. AMD/NVidia's failure to produce usable drivers of their own isn't particularly relevant as far as I am concerned. In fact, it serves to highlight just how good the the FOSS drivers are at "just working".
"Meanwhile, the non-proprietary drivers crash the X server if you so much as jiggle a window about."
That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Frankly, I do not believe it.
All you had to do to crash X was move a window quickly from side to side. The proprietary drivers are infinitely better in so far as they don't crash.
In contrast, audio tends to randomly completely break after every other update. Most recent major breakage I had: for one whole Fedora release, the headset mic input would not work in the one app where I need it to work (Skype). Worked fine on the previous and next releases, with the same Skype binary.
Minor problems that can be worked around just randomly come and go. Right now one one machine all audio playback will stop working every few days, until pulseaudio is killed. Another computer randomly goes to a mode where all audio playback from Chrome is accelerated by IIRC 7%. Just enough to make you uneasy due to things being off somehow, but not enough to make obvious that there's a problem. This persists until pulseaudio is killed and restarted, of course, which magically fixes things.
Intel is actively making a stand against Open Source. I know that's unlike them, but their stance just makes no sense from a free software perspective.
When you look at it from the perspective of Canonical enabling AMD and NVidia to cooperate with introducing a new graphics driver interface, a shadowy doubt is cast over Intel's motivations.
When you look at it from this perspective, a shadowy doubt is cast over Canonical's motivations.
By rolling their own display server, Canonical has set back efforts to get all display vendors on board for supporting Wayland.
If Ubuntu would have switched used Wayland (along with the other distributions), there would have been a very strong incentive for all vendors to support this in their drivers.
There are a lot of things in linux land that don't make sense, I think picking on Canonical for choosing to do what they want as opposed to all the others who are choosing to do what they want, is very un linux like.
If we had solid, feature-complete open source graphics drivers this wouldn't be an issue.
If it's the most popular display framework in terms of use, then why not simply make it the default? Not Wayland nor X11 could garner the numbers required to overtake SF.