2009/3/2 Rowan <rowa...@googlemail.com>:

Unfortunately it's actually not _that_ easy to fulfil Linux-type customer requirements such that all of the following are true:-

a) provide a wide range of diverse hardware at low cost which all works with linux b) support all of those systems through any possible software upgrade path.

Those might be ideal, but they're really hard to achieve. a) has problems in that as a small-time Linux Laptop vendor, you are at the behest of the hardware vendors and manufacturers as to what chips go in them. If the hardware vendor uses some bleeding edge chipset which only has a stable driver on windows then you're screwed. The vendor can of course also change chipset from one revision of a device to another

b) is near impossible with a small vendor because whilst they could test the next version of each distribution they ship on every machine they ship, this would be quite a workload.

I'd say the reason they shipped the non-default driver is so that you have something that _works_. If they didn't then you'd have received a laptop which (out of the box) failed to connect to the network. Whilst there may be side effects to this - such as some manual labour required after a system update, the primary goal of a Linux hardware vendor is surely to ship a device that works from the factory.

I seriously doubt there was any malicious intent, it makes no sense whatsoever for them to deliberately screw machines up for customers.

Cheers, Al.