Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Now it can be better or worse, and right now it's never been better. There was a time when your language, your shell and your operating system were specific to the exact model of comput No, it is not. There was a small period of time between the 90s and the 2010s where you could grab almost every 386 OS and have your hardware mostly decently run for it, and if not, drivers would be easily written from manufacturer…
> There was a small period of time between the 90s and the 2010s where you could grab almost every 386 OS and have your hardware mostly decently run for it And prior to that, you could grab every OS running on IBM clones and not have to worry about graphics drivers at all, because graphics acceleration wasn't a thing. The era you refer to had already introduced software contingency on hardware within x86. This dispar…
Not at all; I excluded this early era because you could _not_ be sure to find an OS that would support your graphics card at all, other than maybe what the BIOS supported. I am talking about the 90s because GPUs already had plenty of non-BIOS-supported features, like multiple CRTCs, weird fixed acceleration pipelines, weird coprocessors with random ISAs, and yet you could still find operating systems with 3rd party drivers supporting them.
It is a _perfectly_ distinguishable era. See how many OSes support 3D cards from the era like i9xx. Heck, FreeBSD itself qualifies, but also BeOS and many others.
In addition, I am talking about the _kernel_ part, which by any logic should be ridiculously simple. E.g. this is not a compiler to a random ISA or anything like that. It is what in Linux you would call a DRM driver, and the only reason they are complex and millions of LoCs is that they are under-specified, by AMD and the rest. Most of lines of AMD driver code in Linux are the register indices for each and every card submodel (yes, really, header files!), when it is clearly that before they would just have standarized on one set and abstracted from it. Compare AtomBIOS support in cards from a decade ago and cards from today. It is literally easier today for a 3rd party to implement support for the more complicated parts of the GPU (e.g. running compute code!), which AMD more or less documents, than it is to support basic modesetting support as it was in the 00s. This has happened!
Hardware may be more complicated, but interfaces needn't be more complicated. This, I believe, is a symptom, not the cause.
> I just don't find it sad that my second desktop can't have an RX 9000 whatever in it. Where's the cut off line for that? Why not be sad that I can't jam a Fujitsu ARM processor into a PCIE slot as another type of satellite processor?
You do not find it sad that there is no longer any operating system other than Linux supporting any amount of hardware, simple or not ?
Also, you call every non-Linux OS as "esoteric" as a counter-argument to my point , yet you try to use support for definitely esoteric hardware (which would be even hard to acquire!) as an argument for your point, whatever it is ? When I'm complaining that I can no longer rely on FreeBSD, literally the 2nd open OS with most hardware support, on supporting basic hardware (!) from this decade, when on the past I could more or less rely on _all_ BSDs supporting it, as well as a myriad other OSes , the argument that "oh well it never supported hardware that it is impossible to find in stores anyway, so I don't care" sounds pretty hollow.
Certainly even slightly deviating from the popular hardware has always resulted in diminishing returns, but today it is much worse, _except_ for Linux.