My (admittedly cynical) interpretation is that they are dropping support for desktop Linux completely and shipping Android drivers instead.

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cogman10 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That'd definitely fit the Qualcom pattern of trying to force you to update by not upstreaming their linux drivers.

This is one place where windows has an advantage over linux. Window's longterm support for device drivers is generally really good. A driver written for Vista is likely to run on 11.

	▲	packetlost 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A stable driver ABI will do that. And a couple billion in revenue to fund bending over backwards to make sure stuff doesn't break.

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tomComb 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I thought “Android drivers” were Linux drivers?

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yjftsjthsd-h 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think the situation is:

Old situation: "Android drivers" are technically Linux drivers in that they are drivers which are built for a specific, usually ancient, version of Linux with no effort to upstream, minimal effort to rebase against newer kernels, and such poor quality that there's a reason they're not upstreamed.

New situation: "Android drivers" are largely moved to userspace, which does have the benefit of allowing Google to give them a stable ABI so they might work against newer kernels with little to no porting effort. But now they're not really Linux drivers.

In neither case does it really help as much as you'd hope.

	▲	justincormack 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Old Android also had a bunch of weird kernel drivers that were not upstream; they mostly are now so Android kernel is converging on Linux finally.

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wmf 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Android drivers don't support Wayland etc.