zlacker

Absolutely. A large part of the reason is that in the OSS world the architecture is optimised to make as much as possible common between drivers for different hardware.

For example for GPU drivers Mesa has tons of common code (NIR, GLSL parser etc) that is shared by all drivers with just the hardware specific parts being per driver whereas closed source vendor drivers reinvent the wheel each time.

Similarly for kernel wifi drivers there is a single MAC802.11 stack shared by all drivers.

Vendor drivers have an initial head start since those writing them have access to internal documents describing the hardware interface and don't have to do reverse engineering. But, over time, OSS drivers can be better as improvements to common code help all drivers.

In fact I think the best way hardware vendors could help OSS is not to provide drivers but documentation.