Comment 338 for bug 441835

I only follow this bug from time so I apologize if the following suggestion is treading on old ground.

It is true that floppies are no longer the norm for most users, but Linux/Ubuntu should still provide reasonable support since there remains a mountain of expensive to replace hardware out there that still uses them. Ultimately, I think the question boils down to what do we mean by reasonable support?

Perhaps auto probing is too much to expect so maybe we don't even try to resolve that mess. Instead, we aim to make a simple way to manually tell the OS that the computer has a floppy after the OS is installed. If this flag is set then the OS does whatever it should to make working with the floppy easy. That means GUI and cli functions that work properly and smoothly. If the floppy present flag is false then the OS hides all floppy related functions from the user. This avoids autoprobe issues and eliminates confusion for new users who are going to wonder why there's a floppy icon on the desktop when they don't have a floppy drive in their machine.

Let me emphasize that I'm an engineer and not a software developer so I recognize that what I propose here may or may not be easy to implement for a variety of reasons. Nonetheless it seems we need to do something to move past the impasse on this question of floppy support and get something that works reasonably well for everyone.

Best Wishes,

John