jkinkennon wrote: I'm just pointing out the support problems which are obvious to so many of us.
No, your pointing out your own opinion of what you think might happen.
My opinion is that Linux users/developers are generally advanced users, and are very familiar with computers, troubleshooting, and software in general. I'm willing to bet that any user who can install and configure linux, will require no "linux specific" support from MDA (unless there is a bug in the HW software - and I've yet to run across a bug in this software).
As far as driver support goes, I mentioned a while back that this is the real "problem" with linux and HW, though it's not insurmountable. It just requires careful research before purchasing an interface.
A good start might be this page:
http://ffado.org/?q=devicesupport/listthough that is only firewire devices. Other usb devices and pciX devices are supported as well. It's also possible to create a virtual soundcard using multiple physical devices (so you can construct 8 channels from four 2 channel usb soundcards, for example). It's not as simple to do this as it is on mac (using their gui) but it is definitely supported by dropping down to a terminal and editing config files.
I'm going to bow out of this thread at this point. The last thread on this topic got locked (due partly to my comments on all of this) and I don't want to upset anyone any further.