The FreedomHEC conference is going to be held in a few weeks, May 26 and 27, following the WinHEC conference for Windows devs. I’ve done an update on the show for NewsForge. With any luck the conference will just be the first of many. I’d like to see manufacturers giving Linux a little more attention.
Hardware support under Linux is much, much better than when I started using Linux in 1996 — but it’s still not on par with Windows. This isn’t due to any technical problems with Linux, it’s because hardware vendors still treat Linux as an afterthought, at best.
This is, unfortunately, a chicken and the egg problem — as long as Linux isn’t as well-supported as Windows, Linux will have a hard time being accepted as a mainstream desktop OS. (Linux is already a mainstream server OS…) Until Linux picks up more marketshare and users demand Linux drivers, vendors will continue to give it subpar support.
