I’ve been in a fortunate position this past year of having some extra money to throw at shiny new hardware and I’ve experienced a side of Linux I haven’t dealt with before…its poor support for shiny new hardware.

I grabbed a Ryzen 9000 CPU and an X870 motherboard…only to find that ethernet didn’t work on kernel 6.11. I had to use a usb-c to ethernet dongle for several weeks until 6.13 released.

Just today and what prompted this post, I splurged on a 4k 240hz HDR monitor. HDR is obviously in-progress and I did not expect it to work out of the box. Critically, what I did expect was for the 240hz part to work, but I couldn’t set it to anything beyond 120. Skip forward a couple hours, and I now know what EDID files are and how to use different ones. For more insight on my night, see this issue, this blog post, and this blog post. After all that, 240hz is smooth, goddamn.

For me, I’m not complaining. I love desktop Linux far more than shiny new hardware. I would return this monitor before considering not using Linux, and in the latter case it was a good chance to learn more about how Linux deals with display devices.

But I’m also one of many people here who wants to see desktop Linux become more popular, and if a regular person encountered either of those issues, they’re going straight back to Windows. While that monitor issue has been fixed upstream, it’s still broken in an up-to-date distro like Fedora and the monitor is over 6 months old at this point.

When it comes to stuff like HDR, that’s obviously progressing quickly and is likely to become a non-factor in the future. But new ethernet controllers and new monitors with invalid DisplayIDs are likely always going to be coming out. Unless you’re willing to tinker, your only option is to wait weeks or months before buying the new shiny thing if you want to use Linux.

That brings me to my question, is there a future where this isn’t the case? And what would be required to get there?

Do motherboard/monitor/IC/etc manufactures need to submit their own kernel patches well in advance of product releases, like what AMD and Intel do for their CPUs and GPUs? Are we just waiting for them to give a shit?

Is there any possibility of hardware support-related patches getting backported to older kernel versions sooner rather than waiting for new major releases?

This is kind of an ungooglable question, and I figured it might make for an interesting discussion topic if anyone has more insight or thoughts on this.