My experience is hardware drivers are in the kernel. And I agree with 
you that the standard PC design was very good.

I ran into a major problem with the serial port driver. The old standard 
8250 UART driver got redesigned and the new design enabled the FIFO but 
did not properly provide a buffer, so there were consistent over-run 
errors. A patch was suggested, and I recompiled the 2.6 kernel, but 
trying to slim down the new kernel was a real challenge.

And everybody tells you the serial port is obsolete, except all those 
modem control lines are very handy. The PCI bus driver and ACPI driver 
really do a nice job with detection and adding interrupts. But that is 
still Windows 98 era stuff just getting optimized.

In reading some kernel driver maintainers' support replies, it seems 
they think all the new devices everybody is designing should not be in 
the kernel. They expressed that maybe device developers should try 
harder to conform to existing standard drivers. Standard concepts like 
terminals, SCSI, IDE, etc., are command based, not driver based.

Other than USB and some Xwindow stuff it all seems too much. If people 
want music, and video and a barrage of internet advertising perhaps they 
should construct their own OS and leave stable computing alone.

Jason Hsu wrote:
> My old antiX-based Swift Linux worked on Windows 98 era computers, but I've been getting complaints that the new Swift Linux (based on Linux Mint Debian Edition) does not work on these old computers.  It's not about RAM or processor speed - it's about driver support.
>
> Is there a way I can provide in the new Mint-based Swift Linux the drivers that make antiX Linux compatible with the Windows 98 era computers?  Or would this require messing around with the kernel?  (I have no idea how to properly do this.)
>
> That said, if I'm forced to choose between supporting Windows XP era computers and supporting Windows 98 era computers, I'm picking the former and ceding the latter to Puppy Linux and antiX Linux.  I don't have the know-how to make Puppy Linux fully compatible with the Debian software repository, and I don't have the know-how to give antiX Linux the superior codec/hardware support of Linux Mint.  Given that Windows XP is already more than 10 years old, I consider the mid-2000s computers to be the future of the lightweight Linux market.
>