What about certification of single devices (dongle devices, printers, etc)
- Keywords:
> There is one thing I am wondering:
>
> There is no certification process for single devices like a tv stick including a "works on ubuntu" sticker.
>
> The Point is: Ubuntu supports so much hardware out there, but anytime if I am in a real standard media-store, I have no possibility
> to buy a device ad-hoc, without having the (minor) risk on my side that the device won't work proper.
>
> Wouldn't it be great to collect information about these kind of devices? If the List of supported hardware exceeds some point
> partners could go in contact with those stores, offering stickers for supported hardware.
That's an interesting idea. That being said, from the Canonical side of things, this will, for all intents and purposes, not happen for a number of reasons:
First, as you pointed out, there are a LOT of devices that fall into this category. These range from usb wireless deviecs to bluetooth adapters to sound cards, display adapters, printers and all manner of devices that may or may not have some sort of linux driver out there.
That is a LOT of devices which leads to the next two points:
We would have no time to certify all these devices. Even assuming we attempted to certify the top 5% of those devices out there, the Hardware Certification team would essentially spend ALL their time certifying individual devices, leaving no time to certify actual computer systems anymore.
We aren't paid to test these things. This is the bottom line, from a business perspective. The computer systems we certify are requested by our OEM/ODM partners. There simply are no component makers asking for us to individually certify items like you mention, and even if there were, they'd have to make a compelling business case for it due to the expense involved in testing.
So, that all being said, I still think that what you ask is a great idea. I've thought that for a very long time, actually, but in order for that to really work, it would have to be a community led/driven effort. For an example of this working right now, but at the Computer System level, rather than the peripheral level, see the Ubutnu Friendly site[1]
That is a community driven testing and reporting effort to help Ubuntu users find computers that, while maybe not certified, have been used and tested successfully by Ubuntu users in the "real world". I would love to see something similar to this for peripheral devices. Printers are a especially painful area that comes to mind, along with Scanners and USB Wifi dongles, which I have to use on one of my laptops.
