Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 09:37:15 -0500 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: BSDi Acquired by Embedded Computing Firm Wind River Message-ID: <15056.30619.213558.966987@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <114947099@toto.iv>
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Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com> types: > So, what happens when someone with a e-machines system with a winmodem, > a bunch of usb peripherals, a crappy monitor and video card goes and > tries to load FreeBSD? Well, their chances of success are lower than if > they tried loading, say, Windows ME. This is because ME has to be designed > to run on that absolute junk hardware - because that's the target market > Microsoft is shooting for. I would change the emphasis on that last bit. ME wasn't designed to run on absolute junk hardware. It was designed to run the Win9X drivers that the vendor of that absolute junk hardware wrote. The end result is the same - it runs on absolute junk hardware. The difference is that MS doesn't pay the price for making absolute junk hardware work, the hardware vendors do. If every absolute junk hardware vendor wrote FreeBSD drivers for their hardware, it would make FreeBSD much more usable on the desktop. It would also take much longer to make major changes to the driver API. I think MS finally got rid of DOS mode driver support in WinME - meaning it took 5 years. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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