Quote Originally Posted by allquixotic View Post

1. No high quality open source NVIDIA and AMD drivers - Yep, exactly. This is the biggest one for me. By "high quality" I mean every piece of the GPU works, all of its acceleration capabilities are unlocked and integrated into the OpenGL and OpenCL runtimes, and typical workloads can utilize a large percentage of the available compute / rendering power.

2. The complete OpenGL stack cannot be legally implemented in/imported into Linux because many OpenGL features (like S3TC texture compression and floating point textures) are patented. -- Yep, exactly. This isn't our fault at all, but it is a problem we have to deal with.

5. "A very bad backwards and forward compatibility." -- A problem we can and should address!
I comment on these cherry picked, because they appeal valid to you, yet are completely invalid in my opinion.

1. Windows: Does it have open source drivers? No, it does not. Linux has - half-arsed, half-shining - but it has. It also has proprietary versions. Who looses?

2. Windows: Does it use opensourced OpenGL stack? What stack is used by Windows? Closed source. For patent reasons. Same thing is used in Linux binary blobs. Is this limitation of Linux? No - it is limitation of software patents that cannot be integrated into opensource solutions. This means currently software patents are reason for development slow-down. Does this apply due to Linux? No.

5. Windows addressed this problem in variety of ways: Stable ABI = Lots of malware. Multiple copies = "DLL Hell" and later "Library Hell" - reason why vista and up use up to 5x more space, and more compared to XP with "Dll Hell". Also, this too adds to "Lots of Malware", since windows does not have ONE fixed stone to build upon, but MULTIPLE broken ones. Software, that is built and works on Bugs and Holes - this is Windows Compatibility. Every sane person understands that software MUST be supported over its lifecycle and it is impossible to produce anything "backward compatible" without actually PLACING CONSTANT effort to have it. This "effortless compatibility" would work only if two things suddenly apply to software development AT SAME TIME:
a) Development freezes
b) Current versions are flawless
Which is utopia!