Met a nice lady at the grocery store

_n9@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 562 points –

Today at the grocery store a sweet older lady approached me and asked if I knew anything about computers. I said yes I do, and she produced a mouse saying that her son set up Linux mint for her and she was wondering if the mouse was compatible. It needed kernel version 2.6 or newer so I said that the mouse should work, guessing mint itself was probably newer than that kernel. Happy with my answer, we chatted a little, then she thanked me and left.

It was a nice experience, so I thought I should share!

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Is this satire? Forgive me, but 99.999% of the population has no idea what a kernel is. Also, since when would a mouse care about your kernel version? Puzzling post.

I'm imagining, it said on the packaging of the mouse that it needed that kernel version.

In Linux, the kernel delivers most drivers, so it may not yet have had the appropriate mouse driver in kernel versions before that.

Maybe this is possible, but typically you're lucky to even find Linux support mentioned at all.

Kind of surprisingly, but kind of not, I've often seen it mentioned for such rather basic hardware.

Thing is:

  • The chip manufacturer sells in extremely high quantities (to many mouse manufacturers).
  • They probably hardly have to do anything for Linux support, because it's such basic hardware. Write a driver once and slightly maintain it over the decades.
  • Aside from low cost, their only real sales argument is reaching a bigger market with their chips, and the Raspi crowd + deals with organizations running exclusively Linux, isn't that irrelevant either.