Quote Originally Posted by elanthis View Post
Out of the box support is highly unlikely. You have to lead the release of the hardware by an absolute minimum of 6 months. More likely closer to a year. And that's of course ignoring the LTS distros that don't update their kernels or drivers for years at a time.

A stable API would be much more useful. A stable ABI isn't so necessary, at least for FOSS drivers. Something like DKMS is more than sufficient; recompile the driver is the kernel is updated. Not super ideal, but it works. If installation CDs have a compiler on them and the system has enough temporary memory, it means you can even get a driver installed via USB stick or somesuch when your SCSI/RAID/SATA controller is missing the driver it needs to install. A stable API is sufficient to ensure that the user can grab a driver and install it on recent Linux distributions.

A stable ABI would be most user-friendly, but is literally never ever going to happen. The Linux developers actively despise making users' life easy because it requires them to spend more than 2 seconds thinking about their kernel interfaces.
First off, this is about the most sensible post in this whole thread. You put your finger on the issue correctly with the last sentence.

That being said; the API does not need to be stable, it should evolve naturally. But it will automatically and naturally become more stable and future-proof if developers do spend more than 2 seconds thinking about their interfaces. Everything else comes from there, naturally, and almost painlessly (it is less painful than the current situation, that's for sure).

Everybody could win, if only the supposedly more clued people would spend some time using that bigger brain that they are supposed to have. Or put differently: by continuing to refuse to work like this, those refusing only prove that they are not deserving of the status that they like to claim for themselves.