[mort96]

These days, MESA provides llvmpipe as a fallback software implementation of OpenGL. But your point absolutely stands, the various graphics APIs are much less consistently available on Linux than DirectX is on Windows, and the split between OpenGL and OpenGL ES hurts a lot, with a lot of systems (especially ARM Mali based ones) only providing OpenGL ES drivers.

[Const-me]

> a lot of systems (especially ARM Mali based ones) only providing OpenGL ES drivers

And sometimes minor hardware revision of these Mali GPUs change the internal API between user mode and kernel mode halves of these Linux GLES drivers.

The kernel handled it pretty well as it supported both hardware revisions. But my user mode app failed because the new hardware required a different version of that libmali-midgard*.so DLL.

Unlikely to happen on Windows because the GPU driver installs both kernel/user mode halves of the driver in one transaction. Linux doesn’t have ABI for drivers, all kernel mode drivers are pre-compiled into the kernel.

[anthk]

ARM it's a crapshoot, but on X86 once you get the libraries right everything runs.

That's why free software should be a requeriment at least for drivers.

I remember the -fake Intel- GMA500/3000 fiasco. My old GL 2.1 based n270 netbook it's still supported and with a small ~/.drirc it fixes some quirks as it MESA misdetects it as a GL 1.4 device, but overall it's tons better than the PowerVR chipset with an Intel coat.

The GMA500 users are stuck even without EXA.