Comment 9 for bug 1044111

@Simon: I'm going to give you a brutally honest answer, as that's going to be more helpful than just silence: Most Linux developers haven't had systems with floppy drives for many many years (me included), and it's actually not that easy these days to find a computer with a floppy these days, at least in the western world. Also, I myself fixed a couple of floppy bugs several years ago, but these are a real ratsnest -- there is just no d**** way to get it right -- you fall into the "hangs the entire system" trap whatever you try and do. The only (local) workaround would be to completely disable probing and support for floppies, but if we do that we get another set of angry users like in bug 1064195.

In essence: it's an enormous task to get floppies work decently, for a miniscule benefit, and there's zero interest.

I know that this isn't satisfying to you, but this is how free software works. If someone really cares about this, one needs to pay some developers/contractors to work on this.