[TeMPOraL]

> Can you imagine every piece of software checking for every piece of esoteric hardware and having some special behavior?

This is what MS Office does. A Microsoft engineer told me once that because many printers lie to the OS about their capabilities, they built a giant lookup table into the Office, that basically consists of "if printer model X, vendor Y and firmware Z, then don't trust it about the fonts onboard, render the text before sending instead".

[byuu]

I remember back in the day doing DirectDraw/Direct3D programming, I had to have lots of "if video card type == x, then ignore these capabilities and do this other thing instead" hacks. A much bigger issue back then when we had more than three video card manufacturers. (it's still a minor issue today ... nVidia cards tend to be way more permissive about OpenGL calls than AMD cards. But I can afford two discrete cards and one onboard chipset.)

It's so completely impractical for a hobbyist project to own every possible piece of hardware, or at least a huge majority of it. Yet it's nothing for a Fortune 500 company to do the same.

Really slants the playing field away from independent software developers.

[TeMPOraL]

Or, you could crowdsource an open-source abstraction layer; this would level the playing field again.