I have hope for Zircon/Fuchsia, because I'm sure the goal, at some point, is "everything supported by AOSP and all Chromebook hardware" which I hope would be enough to bootstrap the positive feedback loop of people contributing drivers…

Well, it's MIT licensed and pushes most drivers into user space, so no one has to contribute drivers back at all. : /

And yet the BSDs have plenty of drivers. How is that possible?

No, the GPL isn't magic.

The BSDs are nowhere near Linux when it comes to driver support. Particularly when it comes to mobile devices like what fuschia is targeting, I don't even know if you can run a BSD with what exists currently.

FreeBSD is probably the closest. At least for the stuff that matters to me :) Specifically, I have a Radeon RX 480 graphics card and a Mellanox ConnectX-2 network card and they work great.

Fun fact, both of these drivers are pretty much copy-pasted from Linux with little changes -- thanks to LinuxKPI, a layer that reimplements some Linux kernel interfaces on top of FreeBSD's.

FreeBSD was close or even ahead of Linux maybe 15 years ago however now Linux too far ahead. Heck Linux gets driver support for hardware before the hardware even exists.

You'd be surprised how many Linux drivers (new and old) actually come from netbsd or freebsd.

Two groups in L4 family used driver VM's that had just enough of Linux to use the drivers. Depending on compatibility vs isolation, you could put your driver-dependent code in that VM, use it via a virtual driver from another partition, or use a native driver on microkernel. I believe OK Labs used that mix for their OKL4 platform for mobile virtualization. It got deployed in what they said was a billion phones mainly for baseband isolation.

So, it's doable. There was also a project a long time ago that combined virtualization with Windows to use its drivers. Stuff like that seems best solution for now where we can incrementally build native drivers over time. At least until cross-platform synthesis is built and takes off. ;)

There's also NDISWrapper which lets you use Windows drivers on Linux.

Only WindowsXP network drivers, which makes it pretty well useless nowadays.

A wrapper around Netbsd's RUMP kernels would be my first choice for a transition solution.

You have Windows :) lol

How so?

For brevity, let's stick with just application management as an example: You can't install two versions of the same application in the vast majority of cases, you can't move applications, good f'ing luck if you want to install something not in the repository, a version newer than what's in the repository, etc.

There's a reason there's so little non-oss software support for Linux.