NVIDIA's Oldest Legacy Driver Will Not Gain New Support

[Hans]

So you guys enjoyed the flame fest?
2. FGLRX drivers, anyone, who have never encountered problems withit: fluid compiz desktop,

My compiz is fluid with fglrx 10.6, with its latest 2d accleration.

tear free window animation, tear free stutter free video playback,

When I enable vsync through the Ati control panel, at least I don't see any tearing. If I disable it, I definitely see tearing.

no locking, games running fine,

Never had any lockups with games in about a half year. I don't game much on linux, but I like QuakeWars, HoN and some wine games like Guildwars. With the latest wine 1.2-rcX and fglrx 10.6 everything seems fine with wine. That said nvidia is probably still better for wine.

X start/stop fine, VT switching fine,

I really think its a year ago, when there were problems with VT switching and X hardlocking when logging out. Also suspend/resume works very well with fglrx.

please say your name below! I would like to see who is the luckiest man in the world. Perhaps you should go buy lotto now, that's definitely going to be able to fund you buying a new video card and your struggle financial situations.

I might be the luckiest man in the world, but at least on Ubuntu 10.04 (one of the supported distroes), fglrx is running just fine. Wine is basically the only thing it might be worse at than nvidia.

Don't believe me? Tell me how to prove it.
Oh and btw. At least fglrx doesn't have problems with xrandr and suspend issues like nvidia does ;-) I own a nvidia too you know (7600 GS).

[V!NCENT]

I used to have problems with Nvidia on my laptop, especially with suspend. However, I haven't had any problems with my Quadro 570m since Ubuntu 10.04 was released. Besides their installer, Nvidia's drivers are spectacular.

Heh... Are you talking the truth? My dad actually has a Dell Precision with a QuadroFX 570m and dual boots win7 and Ubuntu. Boy did he have problems with the nVidia blob. Don't even start about talking such a simple app as Google Earth... The corruption untill hitting the login screen. Hybernate and suspend? Don't even try it. Not what you'd expect from the world ruling nVidia and they top notch "does everything". Even fscking Noveau can do such a basic thing as suspend and resume...

[V!NCENT]

It was taking four to five seconds to minimize/maximize windows.

Never had that problem with my 9800pro, hd3300, hd4870x2, hd5770... Still calling this BS. Must have been some wrong configuration somewhere, but still...

[Shining Arcanine]

Actually, cars have gone BACKWARDS over the years. OLD cars were WAY better than the junk that the (especially US) car makers shove down our throats these days.

Just look at cars in CUBA. OLD OLD OLD American cars from < 1960... and yet SO MANY of them are still holding together. Why? Because they had a SOLID FRAME! They were built to last and last they did. The reason why you don't see as high a proportion of old cars elsewhere is that you have a wasteful economy and all the new bells and whistles tricking people into a DOWNGRADE and slowly reducing the quality and CRUSHING all the stuff that was ***ACTUALLY GOOD***.

If you're going to be in a car and run down by an 18 wheeler, what would you prefer to be in... a 1955 Chevrolet? Or a 2010 Chevrolet? The '55 will take the hit, roll over into the ditch a few times, and hold together. The 2010 will get crushed like tinfoil and you'll be dead.

Anyone remember the GM EV1? That was an honest to god electric car that GM was FORCED to make by the state of california. As soon as they stopped forcing it, GM rounded them all up and crushed them. Every last one. Now they are talking about releasing a new "electric" car -- the so-called "volt", which is nothing more than a CRAPPY plug-in hybrid.

People in the US will replace cars for any reason. People in Cuba replace cars as a last resort, well after the cars would have been considered scrap metal in the US. Talking about old Chevrolets is a bad example of talking about quality going backwards because people in Cuba are still driving them because it is either that or nothing. A trade embargo has kept them from being able to buy new cars since Fidel Castro came to power, so they keep repairing them.

Cars have improved somewhat over the years, particularly in terms of engine design. Car engines are routinely lasting for 150,000 miles, while in the 1960s, they would only last for about 20,000 miles. The main except to this were cars made by Chrysler, which would last back then what regular cars last today.

[jmcharron]

It's not hard, it's a pain in the ass.

Graphics drivers belong at the same place where all the other drivers are -- in the kernel.

Linux support for nvidia hardware is rather poor, thanks to nvidia.

Cry me a river already...

If I didn't care about having a driver that only supports half the features of the chipset and isn't optimized for 3d. Yes, I would run open source drivers. This works for "ALOT" of people that don't want/use those features. But I like alot of people have a $150+ GPU and to want to use a Binary(ati/nvidia) driver to get the most performance/features out of that investment.

[jbrown96]

First, Jockey will install the drivers for you in X. No need to manually download and compile the driver.

Second, if you're willing to drop to a shell to compile and install some drivers, surely learning WPA Supplicant and dhcpd is not beyond your comprehension level.

Way to completely misquote me. The last part of my post was in complete praise of the distro package management for Nvidia.

[locovaca]

It is a pain to install the driver manually. The worst part is that you have to kill X to install it. Since I'm on a laptop, that means network-manager goes as well, and I'm not connected to the internet to download the kernel headers. Then, to make matters worse, Ubuntu constantly renames the kernel source, so I have to mess with that for a while to find the new name.

First, Jockey will install the drivers for you in X. No need to manually download and compile the driver.

Second, if you're willing to drop to a shell to compile and install some drivers, surely learning WPA Supplicant and dhcpd is not beyond your comprehension level.

[jbrown96]

It's not hard, it's a pain in the ass.

Graphics drivers belong at the same place where all the other drivers are -- in the kernel.

Linux support for nvidia hardware is rather poor, thanks to nvidia.

Not sure I agree with this. What Nvidia cards are unsupported by their drivers?

It is a pain to install the driver manually. The worst part is that you have to kill X to install it. Since I'm on a laptop, that means network-manager goes as well, and I'm not connected to the internet to download the kernel headers. Then, to make matters worse, Ubuntu constantly renames the kernel source, so I have to mess with that for a while to find the new name. All this has been mitigated by the maturity of the drivers (fewer reasons to run just released drivers) and good, up-to-date packaging by distros. I've also heard that Nvidia might release a new installer, but to be honest, I doubt that I would use since the distros do an excellent job.

[pingufunkybeat]

1. Installing NVidia binary driver is not hard, you guys who claim it to be hard to do, DON'T USE LINUX! cuz' it's definitely gonna be too hard for your intelligence

It's not hard, it's a pain in the ass.

Graphics drivers belong at the same place where all the other drivers are -- in the kernel.

Linux support for nvidia hardware is rather poor, thanks to nvidia.

[pingufunkybeat]

2. FGLRX drivers, anyone, who have never encountered problems withit: fluid compiz desktop, tear free window animation, tear free stutter free video playback, no locking, games running fine, X start/stop fine, VT switching fine, please say your name below!

Can anyone say this for the nvidia blob? I certainly can't.