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Surprisingly enough, there are a couple that we can't live without. Out of the top of my head, nvidia, ati and broadcom. Because they usually/sometimes have privative drivers so they are somewhat useful... but, what about the rest?

I say that a tag about a commercially available product is fine, but a tag about a company is not. You can see efforts eradicating these in Super User, along with my proposal about company names that are also products: renaming into product-like tags, ie. nvidia -> nvidia-graphics. What does everyone else think?

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  • Occasionally, I have a difficult time linking Device Driver Module to Chipset to OEM manufacture. Why don't you go ask the friendly men on LKML what they think about your idea?
    – Tyler Maginnis
    Commented Oct 3, 2014 at 12:44

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I agree with your logic 100%, except I would be very sure to not go crazy with the product tags either. IMO it's generally enough to mention the model number, product name, etc. in the question. The tags become more useful when there's a large body of Q&A related to a particular thing. When there's only a handful of Q&A about a particular product then there's really no need for the tag to be created just yet.

Also, most issues, though specific to a particular hardware/driver/software version, should be solved using the same basic blueprints. So hiding a general purpose solution under the guise that it's product/vendor specific is just causing us to write 10 different answers for the same general questions.

What do I mean by this?

Well if we have a question that's asking how to map some special keys on a Lenovo/Thinkpad keyboard, the same approach can be leveraged by anyone. The same tools will be used to determine the key's scancode, the same tools will be used to map the key to something else, etc. So we're doing ourselves a huge disservice by tagging these questions with vendor/product tags.

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  • I was thinking more like: broadcom-wireless, nvidia-gpu? not ati-hd-radeon-6000, not at all.
    – Braiam
    Commented Oct 1, 2014 at 2:10
  • I'm not sure how I feel about broadcom-wireless. Seems too excessive, esp. if there's already a wifi tag on it. I still think we use product tags where appropriate but generally discourage them.
    – slm Mod
    Commented Oct 1, 2014 at 2:12
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    On Linux, you're reasonably likely to run across Broadcom WiFi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet chipsets. Possibly their MPEG gear as well.
    – derobert
    Commented Oct 1, 2014 at 10:02
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    Oh, and also I'm pretty sure the steps to map keys on a Thinkpad won't help on my Asus laptop, because the special keys on Asus laptops have their very own kernel driver...
    – derobert
    Commented Oct 1, 2014 at 10:03
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As so often with tags, the important thing is that the tag excerpt and description point the "tagger" towards the appropriate use.

A description for currently is:

nVidia is a manufacturer of graphics cards.

That doesn't help most of the taggers in the appropriate usage of that tag.

Something like:

nvidia is used for question particular to the nVidia range of graphic boards/chips and their drivers. Use it only if you know for sure the problem is not a general graphics board issue (in that case use the tag: graphics)

(Please note that the first word has the casing of the tag, not the proper casing with regards to how the company writes their name: nVidia. Also note that there is no markup in the excerpt (so no [tag:graphics]))

And a more informative (currently empty) wiki description.

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