Ah, that is why the community tries so hard to break hardware and reverse engineer devices...
This seems like a total non-sequitur, unless there’s a link I don’t see?
The people try really hard to get working the systems they are interested in, and then share their results. I mean there are various wikis out there with big lists of printers and wifi dongles (thankfully less of a thing nowadays) that are listed in states of:
* I actually could try this on my side and it works
* This brand usually has drivers, good luck!
* Totally unusable.
Imagine if a company with a customer service relationship, like Microsoft, went around dropping support for reasonably recent hardware! It would be seen as a sure sign that they’d betrayed their customers and dropped all pretense of competence. But the expectations for a community project are happily different.
The open source community is in the end just a bunch of developers who share their solutions to help each other out. If other parties copy their stiff, it doesn’t make the open source community’s problems un-solved.
The year of Linux on the desktop would be a total nightmare, can you imagine a bunch of non-technical bug reports and feature requests hitting all these mostly volunteer projects? What a mess.