Comment by trelane
1 year ago
Lots of things are available in a specification. HTML, for instance. Just being an open specification is insufficient when there's a superdominant implementation. At that point, that implementation is the specification.
In HTML, it was Internet Explorer for a long time, now it's Chrome/Chromium.
In ACPI, it's Windows. In fact, Linux pretends to be Windows because anything else is a shipwreck graveyard of disappointment and untested code.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/28848/what-does-the-kernel-b...
Also, see the whole necessity of patching your DSDT (Windows users: "The what?" Linux users: nodding sadly) https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/DSDT
Modern computers are sufficiently complicated that they really only support one OS. And of course, those are almost entirely Windows computers. Buy a computer with Linux preinstalled, with support, if you want to avoid having to care about things like this (or having a computer that never works quite right (e.g. doesn't reliably suspend or the fans are running wrong)).
The situation with HTML was worse in 2000 than it is today.
Early on Netscape introduced its own non-standard behavior for broken HTML (tags not properly closed.) Somewhere between 30-60% of HTML was broken so any competitive browser had to (i) render broken HTML and (ii) render broken HTML in the same undocumented way as Netscape!
Microsoft figured this out with IE but it was one barrier in the way to alternative browsers. This undocumented behavior was finally documented in the HTML 5 spec.
Now you might say the "whole stack" has the Chrome problem in that Chrome has some features that (some) other browsers don't have such as
https://caniuse.com/css-cascade-scope
https://caniuse.com/view-transitions
https://caniuse.com/css-text-wrap-balance
but a lot of those features are in the "cherry on top" category and there is a fairly healthy process of documenting how they work and the features proliferating to other browsers except when Apple doesn't want them to. (Gotta keep developers in that app store.)
Only because Web has effectively turned into ChromeOS with one vendor left standing.
It's not a perfect parallel. For instance, the tooling used to create HTML isn't almost universally provided by one vendor (Microsoft), and then run by the same vendor (still Microsoft.) It's also not like the CEO of that company we ever caught speculating on how to lock out competitors using that same technology. (OK, that's true of both HTML and ACPI)