ubuntuforums-unanswered team mailing list archive

[Tom <question78779@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Question #78779 on Ubuntu changed:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/78779

    Status: Open => Answered

Tom proposed the following answer:
Hi

Sorry no-one has got back to you sooner.  It might be worth posting the same question in a few forums
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Signpost/Questions#help
http://www.linuxquestions.org

Also try visiting the manufacturers website and see if there are any
forums worth asking in and perhaps a "Contact Us" part of their website.

Often hardware manufacturers seem to demand that you use Windows (or, reluctantly, Mac) in order to use their product.  Luckily linux devs are pretty good at reverse engineering a lot of these things so that decent drivers can be built but it takes time.  Sometimes hardware manufacturers say stupid things like "We haven't time to build all the different drivers for all the different versions of linux, it costs too much to produce the 4 or 5 we need for Windows" not realising that developing just 1 OpenSource driver would cover all the different versions of gnu&linux, gnu&hurd, bsd, unixes and also all the Macs.  Hardware manufacturers also sometimes say they wont support use in linux because it's such a tiny market - which is true but unlike with Apple and Windows it's a rapidly growing, even exponentially growing, market.  The figures up to 1998 at which point it started to get silly to even try to measure it
Year . Number of users
1991	1 
1993	20,000
1995	500,000
1997	3,500,000
1998	7,500,000
1999	12,000,000
We are now seeing some hardware manufacturers such as Dell, Asus and a couple of others starting to ship product lines with linux pre-installed and already some people are choosing to avoid certain manufacturers such as CreativeLabs because they don't provide linux drivers.  Some analysts say that when linux usage reaches 10% of the desktop market, it's currently estimated at 2% by many, most hardware manufacturers will be forced into supporting linux usage of their equipment in order to stay afloat.  But by then buying trends amongst linux users may have become established and hardware manufacturers that aren't already supporting linux will find it difficult to break into the market!  

Anyway i would seriously consider getting your money back on this
product and clearly stating that the reason for returning it is lack of
support for linux.  Some people have already done this type of thing and
the more of us that do the bigger the message we send to hardware
manufacturers and the sooner we find that all this is a non-issue.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

-- 
You received this question notification because you are a member of UF
Unanswered Posts Team, which is an answer contact for Ubuntu.