You used a usb trackball as an example in a previous e-mail. But you also mentioned how it might prompt you for the driver. That helps prove another person's point about how the hardware vendors write the drivers for Windows, but not for Linux. Linux programmers have to spend time writing the driver - without documentation or help from the manufacturer, Windows programmers just have to worry about plugging in the driver as needed.
But in my case, there exists both a Windows driver and a Linux driver for the device in question. The difference seems to be that in Linux, I have to go manually configure gpm and xf86 in order to use the newly-plugged-in trackball. On windows, it works automatically.
And suppose that for each OS, the OS didn't know how to handle the device. Windows will pop up a dialog asking you to supply a driver. Linux (and KDE/Gnome, I suppose) just let the device sit there, unusable, without suggesting any course of reparative action to the user.
For instance, if Linux would just say, "Hey, you plugged in a USB device that I don't really know how to use. I can tell it's a mouse of some sort, but I don't know how to use it. What's the name of a module that I should try for it?" then it would be a lot more like my Windows experience.
-- Christian Convey Computer Scientist, Naval Undersea Warfare Center Newport, RI
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