Alan Kay's philosophy: People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware

Registered by Gonzalo Fernandez

Alan Kay said: People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

The elementary OS community has demonstrated how serious they are about their software.

Now, given that making their own hardware is certainly possible but not in eOS scope right now... (anyone can place an order to an asian manufacturer that will brand your product, using crowd-funded money); why not select a small group of sorta-worldwide available computers (i.e. the Lenovo T430, the MacBook Air 11" and 13" mid 2012, etc.) and thoroughly test it and support it in elementaryOS down to the cooling fans, low power consumption, touchpad, touchpad gestures, hibernation, suspend and resume, keyboard backlights, webcam... you get the idea.

Of course the testing would be done by the community, and the hardware support would be configured automatically during installation.

Also for each of the computers supported, there would be a wiki, how-to, and user forum.

For the rest of the world, using a non-officially supported computer, things will remain the same, your hardware will be supported most of the time, as it has always been with Ubuntu, and you can always find drivers, help and how-to's from the Ubuntu, Debian and Linux community.

The point for all this is not only to make life easier to some users, but also to have steady, reliable test scenarios for apps and OS components. For example, think about Gala effects. If we can focus on a small group of graphics cards, we can enhance the window manager and make the animations and effects pixel-perfect more effectively. Another example, think about the LightDM greeter, Wingpanel size, Slingshot size. If we have a small group of supported resolutions, we can focus and give the users of those supported systems a great elementaryOS experience.

Actually this is not a totally new or ground breaking idea, I can see that after installing eOS Luna in my Macbook Air late 2011, everything just works, the fans are silent, the power consumption is low, suspend and resume works... So obviously someone has been working on that behind the scenes. All this out of the box magic does not happen when I install plain Ubuntu 12.04, last time I checked.

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