Planet Debian had a post about hardware compatibility with linux, and how every once in awhile, there are regressive errors in new releases that cause things to stop working. Yes, this is a pain, but it comes as no surprise to me. Software is one of those things where each fix may cause another break. That's why testing is so incredibly important.
Currently there is a kernel oops reporting system, and I believe one for Gnome as well. It would be very nice if in addition to a reporting system for bugs, there was a reporting system for hardware profiles. This would be similar to "popularity-contest", which sends back data to the debian project about which packages are used. It is an optional program, and I submit this data for all my computers.
While profiles are not complete data, but it might help with the bug reports, and instead of just dumping all the text from hardware profiles, it might be helpful to instead have statistics about who is trying to support what hardware.
Any thoughts to share?