You're talking about the really great out-of-the-box support that audio always enjoys on Linux, right?

No, let's be honest--we'd end up with a half-dozen opinionated projects with slight overlap implementing different graphical interfaces, and another half-dozen metaprojects on top of that. Fuck. That.

Just give me a competent implementation of OpenGL or Direct3D by leading vendors who know their hardware and quirks, and be done with it.

Audio support accross the board is actually better, than the graphics support.

What is changing now, is that because of the consolification of commercial OSes, there is strong commercial pressure to support linux now, just to keep an open OS. What is happening with opengl on linux now, is because of this change.

So, audio isnt a good counter example: who knows how much worse it would have been with closed source drivers.

And the problem isnt having multiple solutions/systems available: the problem is lack of a clear winner.

Companies like Valve and Canonical will be getting more dominant in picking the "winning" systems. This is true already to such an extend, companies like NVidia and AMD go out of there way to please companies like Valve. Contrast this with the kind of get-on-our-knees-and-beg relationships the linux community has had.

And Valve is arguing for opensource drivers. You should read Intels blog about their cooperation. They felt like they had to constantly remind Valve, they were preaching to the choir.

And NVidia and AMD might not give Linux much priority, but they will not let Linux ruin their relationship with the gaming industry.

The point about open drivers is continuity and integration. The HW vendors really should concern themselves with the quality. The opensource community should concern itself with adapting that support to their needs.

I want NVidia to write and maintain their driver, but i want them to publish the source. They are ones that should maintain quality: they are the ones profitting from it with hardware sales.

Audio is a really bad example, because the actual hardware is pretty much without a meaningfull profit margin, being integrated and all. And at the other side, there are few needs that reach beyond just "play this audiobuffer". I dont know who writes these systems, or what motivates them. But 99% of the needs were already fullfilled with OSS.

Thats very different from game developpers contributing to the graphics infrastructure, to fix actual problems they have.

"Thats very different from game developpers contributing to the graphics infrastructure, to fix actual problems they have."

I think you grossly overestimate the time most developers have to fix other peoples' problems, especially game developers.

In fact, I'll go out further: if you give game developers the impression that they can go look at driver code, you are opening an entire box of sadness and compulsive brittle micro-optimization that will consume a lot of man hours.

It doesn't matter about the power trip Linux people can have now that the graphics vendors are coming to them. It doesn't matter about the "freedom" to have overworked and underpaid developers muck around in driver code that frankly may exceed what they are competent at doing. It doesn't even matter that the open-source community can now second-guess and snarf about shitty vendor driver code.

What matters is that this innocent little idea could do very, very bad things to developers. "It Just Works, don't worry" is a solid reassurance, and having my game fail because some neckbearded jackass decides to recompile the Nvidia sources but-oh-so-different and push it upstream is unacceptable.

This is a bad idea.

And, for chrissakes, let's start small. How about you give me a stable ABI to program against, and we'll take it from there? Baby steps.