Linux Support

>"new kernel releases get, I guess, under 10,000 hours per kernel release"
that is true, however, think about how much more regularly linux kernels are updated. They are not comparable. And if you're claiming windows drivers never have bugs, you're dead wrong.

>"Specialized software to manage devices like printers, scanners, cameras, webcams, audio players, smartphones etc. *almost always* just doesn't exist."
Okay, let me debunk most of that. Of course, not 100% of all hardware has drivers, but a ton of it does, and among printers, scanners, cameras, and webcams, almost every piece of hardware on the market *does* have support.

>printers
What is CUPS? What is HPLIP? What is foomatic? What is 127.0.0.1:631?
I've not actually had an unsupported printer in the last 8 years, even when I wasn't the one who bought the hardware to begin with. HP and Brother definitely support Linux printers, and a lot of others do too, but I don't pay as much attention.
>scanners
What is SANE? If you want a graphical frontend, what is xsane? Have yet to find an unsupported scanner. The ones I've used were made by HP, Brother, Xerox, and Fujitsu.
>cameras
Okay, first of all, what is an SD card reader? Can't get much better than that.
If you mean connecting via a USB cable to a computer, sorry to disappoint you, there's linux support for that.
Check out gphoto2 (the library that handles basically everything) and gphotofs (a FUSE filesystem for mounting cameras over gphoto2).
PTP and MTP (the two most common kinds) work with it. Additionally, many cameras just are USB mass-storage devices. These are quite definitely supported under linux.
>webcams
This one's a bit harder to find. There is firmware to make the iSight cameras in older iMac's work, newer iMac's have webcams working out of the box. However, looking at this list of compatible webcams, what you're saying ("software *almost always* just doesn't exist") is just not true at all:
http://www.ideasonboard.org/uvc/
>audio players
gtkpod, amarok, banshee, and rhythmbox will all sync any of the older lines of ipods (up to and including the last generation ipod classic) on linux. Also, if you want to, you can flash a custom OS to the ipod classic as well as just about any other MP3 player on the market called RockBox. This gives you easy access to advanced settings, options for stereo downmixing and custom equalizer settings, a full game boy color emulator, a doom engine, FLAC support, chiptune file support, and a TON of other things the normal firmwares cannot. You do not even need windows to flash this firmware to an iPod: all you need is to boot it into a DFU mode.

Give me devices THAT YOU OWN that don't have linux compatibility, and I'll try to find a way to make them work. If you're just looking for an edge-case, I'll grant there is not 100% compatibility and some crappy low cost cameras just won't work.
>smartphones
This is sometimes a problem spot.
>Can't upload firmware to Galaxy S3
What is heimdall?
>Apple iCrap:
libusbmuxd works just fine. I've even connected a USB cable to an iPad, SSHed through the USB by relaying TCP data over the USB connection, and used SSH to tunnel a LTE data internet connection without using any special paid jailbroken apps. Also, on that note, keep in mind that you say "cannot fully control" - Windows cannot fully control an iOS device either, or you'd be able to downgrade firmware. iOS devices are fundementally closed systems. I used my iPhone 4S with Linux on a laptop for years, though.
>X.org constantly changes
Not too much, actually, or we'd have thrown it out long ago. That protocol is pretty stupid sometimes.
>kernel API's/ABI's constantly change
No, the kernel API's are pretty stable. ABI's do change.

Torvalds: "If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs."

Also, most distros are mostly ABI compatible, due to the Linux Standard Base (LSB), though note that many are not 100% compliant. Similar reasons to why old windows 95 games don't run in windows vista properly.

>nvidia and broadcom just don't want to keep playing catch-up with kernel people
WRONG. The broadcom firmware from *9 years ago* for one of my cards still operates in linux kernel 4.1. The firmware binary is loaded onto the chip - that's the only closed source part and required to operate the chip. The rest of the driver is open source and is regularly updated by kernel maintainers to keep everything working smoothly.
NVidia is pretty closed source, but it does a remarkable job keeping up to date with linux kernel releases, and a lot of their driver is distributed as source code to maintain API compatibility. Linux kernel versions strive to be API compatible - not ABI compatible.

>no standardization
what is the Linux Standard Base? What is ANSI/ISO/IEC's C standard? What is their C++ standard? What is POSIX? What is the X.org consortium? What is the USB standard? What is the PCI standard? What is the PCI express standard? What is the ATA standard? What is SCSI? What is System V init? What is the Single Unix Specification (Inspur K-UX conforms officially, and is closely related to Red Hat - in reality most distros meet the specification but don't bother paying for certification)? What is OpenGL? What is C89? What is C99? What is C11? What is XPG3? What is XPG4? What is XPG4v2? What is RS-232? What is ACPI? What is a BIOS call?

I think you'll find linux supports more international standards than windows does, software-wise (I.E. POSIX and a more rigorous C++ implementation)

userland tools to manage packages are a user choice and do not need to be standardized as long as they all work for their given tasks. Not all linux kernels need package managers at all, in embedded applications. Remember that.

Audio in linux is fragmented, but everything but OSS (which no one uses anymore) relies on ALSA at some level or another. I'll grant you that though.

>internal wars/lack of cooperation leading to breaking other projects
This happens. It happened at Microsoft. Remember MS Java, that implementation that put microsoft-specific functions into com.java.*. It ditched JNI for J/Direct to ensure it wouldn't work on other platforms.
Look at the halloween documents to see the kind of crap MS was doing, but ON PURPOSE, to break compatibility.
http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/index.html

This isn't to deny that there are internal wars. FFmpeg and AVconv comes to mind.
AVconv forked, ffmpeg merged in any changes avconv made to add functionality, avconv didn't return the favor, and ffmpeg continued to get new features as well. It became the better product as a result, because the projects were both open source.

>Constantly bombarded with changes you didn't expect or didn't want
Since when? Usually program updates for linux tools I use don't ruin things - the one exception being GNOME 3 - but that happened once. Windows 8 was shit and Windows 10 continued to be shit. If you don't like what happened to a program in linux, you can fork it and use the version you liked and maintain it. If enough others share your views you will eventually replace the shitty program that updated. I've not had to do this and programs never have forced changes on me I wasn't prepared to cope with. In windows, you're given a binary and have to deal with whatever shit they've pulled, like *phoning home* in windows 10. In home edition, this cannot be disabled. Even the group policy settings in the registry don't matter.

> unstable API's / ABI's & the lack of real compatibility
Have yet to have the amount of trouble with open source programs as you suggest. Closed source, sure. I've had problems. If a closed source program really cares they'll include their own libc library especially for their program, and they will statically link where possible.
I have had 1 QT 3 program I wanted in the ENTIRETY of my time using linux (8 years) and was unable to get to build.
>there is no winSxS for linux
what is static linking? what about _API_and_not_ABI_compatibility_ is unclear to you?
>can't install two conflicting libraries
yes you can.
What is LD_PRELOAD in a wrapper script? Set it to the path to your incompatible library and it automagically works.
>debian dropped LSB
Not quite.
" As it stands today, [Didier Raboud of the debian project's LSB group] said, Debian's lsb-* meta-packages attempt to require the correct versions of the libraries mentioned in the standard, but no one is actually checking that all of the symbols and data definitions are met as a result. "
If the versions are the same, you will likely still have compatibility. If you want to complain about old programs being incompatible, copy mplayer2.exe (windows media player 6) from an XP machine to a vista or higher machine. Won't work. Nope. Also, does it matter really?

There are only _8_ applications by 6 companies on the LSB certified applications list, of which only one is against LSB >= 4.

And, since Ubuntu is Debian based and everyone who bothers with closed source on linux targets Ubuntu, application binaries for linux will quite probably continue working on Debian. Debian is a MASSIVE powerhouse in the linux world.

Also, FHS compliance will be maintained.

Also also, here's a quote from what looks to be a virtualbox dev on the relevance of LSB:

"VirtualBox provides a package which aims to run on random Linux distributions. We do not pay attention to the LSB, instead we try to work with what distributions actually do. More specifically, we are moving to looking at the tools present on a system (e.g. systemd, insserv for system services) rather than the actual distribution and working with those, fixing things when that breaks in some particular configuration which we think is worth supporting."

>muh gaymes
While I personally don't give a shit about games, that 98%-incompatible number of AAA games looks like it's pulled out of your ass. Are 100 AAA games REALLY released on PC's of any OS in a year? What constitutes AAA for you?

>but can it Wurd?
OpenOffice and derivatives work just fine. Now fuck off. You're blaming the developers who did all of this hard work when you should be blaming Microsoft for not porting its suite to Linux.

>Muh CIFS
What a hypocrite. You claimed Linux didn't follow standards earlier.
CIFS was never standardized, it was closed source introduced by Microsoft that was reverse engineered into Samba, which DOES work for CIFS, btw.

SSHFS is better anyway, and yes, there are working SSHFS implementations for windows, thanks to FOSS developers who cared.

>money/enthusiasm/responsibility/motivation
This is a problem, but claiming financially supported devs for linux don't exist is bullshit. Intel developers are paid to contribute to the linux kernel, as are nvidia(!) developers, AMD developers, EMPia (you've probably not heard of them but they make video capture chipsets) developers, broadcom(!) developers, and more.

Some projects do die, but they can be revived by other people. If there's a program you want that's dead, why don't you get off your ass and do something about it, instead of bitching about it? It's not like programs for windows never die.

>HIG guidelines not adhered to by anyone
I dunno how much sense it'd make for GTK devs to follow KDE-written guidelines, or XFCE devs, for that matter. You could pick any number of GUI guidelines and claim that. Windows doesn't follow the HIG guidelines either, for example. Nor does OS X - Apple made its own human interface guidelines. Windows doesn't follow Apple's either. That was a weak point.

>muh flash acceleration
output acceleration works.
What is libvdpau-va-gl?

Decoding, this is true. It's not Adobe's fault either - it's the graphics chipset manufacturers. Still not the mainline kernel devs.

>proprietary features not supported without using proprietary drivers
BAWWW.

>keyboard modifier doesn't work for 10 years
wow. That's totally true. interesting. Here's that bug btw.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=865
However, if you can just use something besides 'shift' as the last key in your shortcut this can be worked around. Not that the bug isn't there - it is - but it's not as dire as this claims.

>X.org sucks
yes, we know. We've only been trying to replace it for 15 years now.

>I have to compile software. My puny brain cannot comprehend googling my problems. I don't wanna build software.
Builds character. Also builds from source. I was no real techie when I first did it when I was 12. Regular Joe isn't 12, is he?
Also, what is:
./configure
make
sudo make install

>Muh gaymes
This was already bitched about once.

>but can it Wurd?
This was already bitched about once.
BTW, Excel and Word documents both open just fine in LibreOffice - it's only powerpoint that's given me trouble. And a protip: MS's powerpoint viewer utility works in wine. So does MS Office 2003 and 2007.

>but can it Adobe?
wine works VERY well for adobe products, but it is still a problem. Don't blame it on Linux, though, blame it on Adobe for not targeting Linux.
GIMP and inkscape work for me, but I know that they can be harder to use at times.

>Corel
Never used it, know nothing about it, could be a fair point but I don't care.

>AutoDesk
What is wine?

>optical disc authoring
That works fine. Use devede.
Also, windows DVD authoring software can usually make an ISO on linux, which is burnable with a native linux program.

>audio applications:
> SoundForge
What is audacity?
> CuBase
What is RoseGarden?
I have used both SoundForge and Audacity and there's just about nothing I can't do in Audacity. RoseGarden + JACK is amazing.

>Muh windoze proprietary features aren't in an open-source OS (Windows Network File Sharing)
So code themself, you lazy fuck. SSHFS is extremely simple to use, and I have no idea what your problem is.
[code]sshfs user@url-or-ip:/path-to-mount local-dir-to-mount-to/[/code]

> Linux doesn't have a reliably working MTP implementation
Not going to lie, I had no idea what MTP was until I looked it up. That's how little it matters. There are FUSE implementations.
>FUSE doesn't cut it
Uhh, explain. FUSE filesystems are MORE flexible than kernel-mounted in that you can allow non-root users to use them.
>In order to work with your MTP devices, like ... Linux based Android phones you'd better use ... Windows or MacOS X.
Correction: Mac OS X has ZERO MTP SUPPORT. Linux has libMTP.
>Too many things in Linux require manual configuration using text files. I never learned how to read and write
That's your own problem, bub.
>Forget about managing your e-gadgets (specially smartphones, e.g. iPhones are useless under Linux).
This was already bitched about once.
I have already said how much I was able to do with my iPhone - I even remotely mounted it's entire filesystem over USB with SSHFS.

>Yeah, let's consider Linux an OS ready for the desktop.
Agreed.