NVIDIA Talks Of Optimus Possibilities For Linux

[bridgman]

Focus for a minute

==> WEB PAGE <==

How does the amd.com web page that crazycheese wants get more money for Linux development ?

We have been spending money in advance of market growth for years, isn't that all you are suggesting here ? The "Linux market growth" you are talking about is mostly Android on smartphones, not PCs, which although nice to see doesn't translate into increased "desktop Linux" or PC sales. Without that...

Hey, are you listening to me ?

[bridgman]

Q, please, go back and read carefully. Adagio al formaggio, OK ?

Yes I did mean slowly with cheese.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

but I don't think anyone has ever said workstation-only

Let me quote Farhad S, AMD Global Customer Care employ:

We are fully concentrated on Linux distributions that are being installed by our OEM and Workstation customers.

Ticket number 8200418370, message from June 30, 2011. So because of there is so many troubles with for example Gnome 3. Bridgman, tell us how we can influence AMD decisions about FGLRX?
Tech. support is just doesn't want to escalate tickets about unsupported distribution. For example about openSUSE with Gnome or Kubuntu. So to report bug with KDE in Kubuntu I need to install openSUSE with KDE and reproduce it. For Gnome 3 there is no way to report bug to tech. support. Isn't it look very strange since there already supported Ubuntu and KDE (but only in openSUSE)?
Yes, there is two other ways to report bugs to FGLRX developers (feedback and bugtracker) but they just doesn't care about it since this bugs in not supported distributions (becayse they "are fully concentrated on Linux distributions that are being installed by our OEM and Workstation customers").

[mlau]

@Bridgman

How much money do microsoft pay to amd to make sure amd do not sell linux desktop/notebook products on there website ?

Whoa, take it easy. Not everything is a MS/HW Vendor conspiracy to keep Linux down.

[enrico.tagliavini]

I used to argue the same way you do but after 15 years of Linux on my desktop I've seen the consequences. You would most likely already have Optimus support if the driver had been open. Tossing nvidia a bone here because they are late to the party will not make things any better in the future.



Stopped by manufacturers, not by Linux. Only having binary drivers for Linux is also a stopper for Linux on the desktop. Either way you loose.

...

Binary drivers are fine as long as they don't have bugs and are updated at the same time the software they interact with change. I don't see any of those drivers around? If you load a binary driver your whole kernel gets tainted, and as a consequence you cannot contribute back to the kernel in form of bug reports. Without bug reports the bugs will not get fixed. If Linux is full of bugs, it will not succeed on the desktop, mobile or server platform. I understand your reasoning but in this case the nvidia way of serving their customers is counter productive for the rest of the Linux community. Use the proprietary nvidia driver if you must, but at least don't tell that to nvidia


They have been doing the right thing for years, but from a user perspective it's not always that obvious.

I can't say you are wrong. In fact your point is more than good. Intel is the "good guy" in this game, intel FOSS driver is almost on par with the windows one. Unluck for us AMD doesn't put the same effort on the FOSS radeon driver (and here i mean they should hire more devs to work on radeon, given that with just 4 devs and the community we have a quite nice driver, but still far from the binary one). I doubt NVIDIA will change its mind about FOSS drivers.... I wonder if the best way to make them change is to contrast them (not a way i like, but NVIDIA customers which wants linux support might do some pressure on NVIDIA this way), or try to collaborate and hope they can see the light. Can't say really. But surely i will always avoid NVIDIA for now as i done in the past 10 years.

[bridgman]

Let me quote Farhad S, AMD Global Customer Care employ:Ticket number 8200418370, message from June 30, 2011.

??? Farhad didn't say "workstation only", he said "workstation and OEM", which includes a lot of non-workstation configurations.

The most effective way to influence AMD would probably be to influence the OEMs who buy our parts - either buy more Linux preload systems from them or get the message across that while you are buying Windows systems your intent is to run with Linux and your satisfaction with the product will be driven by your Linux experience. That latter part of the message does not seem to be getting through at all today.

Remember how big and low-margin the PC market is. A few thousand earnest users aren't likely to make a difference; you need to think about dangling 500,000 potential customers in front of one person to get their attention.

[bridgman]

just answer the question: why is amd.com a 100% Microsoft windows commercial ? why amd does not sell linux notebooks on amd.com? why is amd not sell linux desktop pcs on amd.com? why there are no amd linux commercials at all? and only amd windows commercials?

I suspect the list of PCs on the site is based on input from our larger customers, and AFAIK they haven't had much success selling Linux preload systems. Has anyone on here actually bought a PC preloaded with Linux from a major OEM ?

[Ansla]

First of all, like somebody said before, OEM systems usually contain very weird choices of hardware components so it's very unlikely I will ever buy an OEM desktop. That only leaves OEM laptops, not that don't contain weird choices of hardware components, but it's harder to assemble one from parts . Now, when I buy a laptop I'm interested in a truly portable device, that excludes all regular sized laptops (15" and bigger) as they are simply to bulky. And all small laptops with AMD APU, at least those sold in my country, have either Windows or Freedos preinstalled. Would it help if I got one with Freedos? Or would it be better to get one with Linux and Intel CPU?

Actually the question was if we bought a PC with Linux preinstalled, not about AMD PCs, so yes, I bought about 3-4 years ago an EeePC with Linux preinstalled.

[bridgman]

Would it help if I got one with Freedos?

Last I heard was that Freedos systems were generally being counted as "pirate Windows" (perversely, so were Linux preloads back when the price of a Linux preload was lower than a Windows preload) so guessing it wouldn't help.

The sucky thing is that you need pretty large numbers to influence perception. The good news is that Android might be able to supply those numbers, if we can dance over the fact that the graphics environment (and hence driver requirement) is somewhat different between Android and traditional distros. There are some common areas (eg power management) which can probably be helped though...

[Kano]

It is easy to count pirated XP system, they are ie6 users, look at

http://www.ie6countdown.com/

they disabled updates Nice place for worms and other funny things *g*