The Good & Bad OpenGL Drivers On Linux

[mmstick]

Nvidia responded within 6 days, so its different.

No....they didn't...re-read the article.

[brosis]

No....they didn't...re-read the article.

Thanks, I re-read it. Actually, they responded within 6 hours, not days.

Source
Update: 6h after posting this article, three people from NVIDIA independently contacted us with contact info in case we needed to report anything related to their driver. While this doesn't really help most of the open source world, it will definitely help us in the future! Thanks, NVIDIA!

[mmstick]

Thanks, I re-read it. Actually, they responded within 6 hours, not days.

Note how it says, "6 hours after posting this article". Which means they completely ignored the forums and only noticed them when someone linked this article to internal NVIDIA employees.

[Awesomeness]

Yes, the first thing we want to suggest to new Dolphin users is to replace half of their graphics stack with packages from an unofficial source
It's unfortunately not that easy

Why not simply always use the latest distribution release? What's the obsession with using old software?
BTW: Fedora gets new Kernel releases and at least Fedora 19 got a new Mesa version as regular update.

[log0]

Note how it says, "6 hours after posting this article". Which means they completely ignored the forums and only noticed them when someone linked this article to internal NVIDIA employees.

Yeah, seems to be the only effective way, go public and make some noise.

[CrvenaZvezda]

All I care about is how does the FLOSS drivers handle. Until FLOSS drivers are the default for everyone I will be nagging about this.

[dee.]

Why not simply always use the latest distribution release? What's the obsession with using old software?

How about getting support for 5 years and not having to do an update that possibly ends up bricking your system every 6-9 months?

[Caledar]

How about getting support for 5 years and not having to do an update that possibly ends up bricking your system every 6-9 months?

Turn off updates for that package?

[Ericg]

How about getting support for 5 years and not having to do an update that possibly ends up bricking your system every 6-9 months?

'Support' is a pretty... iffy phrasing. Red Hat's good about backporting kernel / mesa features from future releases back into 'stable' releases. Ubuntu has gotten BETTER about it via the "Service Pack" updates for LTS's but the user has to manually install those, they aren't automatic updates. Debian's the worst because they just arbitrarily call something 'stable' and then backport only bug fixes. The exception being MAYBE backports but I'm not even sure if Backports handle kernel and mesa updates.

Also what kind of update are you doing that 'bricks your system' ...? Unless you're on fairly old hardware where things don't get tested a kernel releases probably isnt gonna brick your system... Mesa same deal, if you're using one of the 'tier 1' (intel, radeon, nouveau) drivers an update shouldn't break things because they get tons of testing. Xorg updates... X in the past has broken things on hardware but the devs seem to have gotten better about it.

Also its not even an issue of "I dont want to update every 6months." Even Fedora gives you 18 months of updates from date of release, Ubuntu gives 2 years if I remember right... Suse I don't know.

Frankly not updating graphics drivers is almost shooting yourself in the foot given how far behind the open source drivers are and how quickly features are added. Because we're hitting the point where the features being added are the features that are USED in software (VBO's for Dolphin for example. If you dont have them you get a very slow workaround). These arent 'cutting edge' (OpenGL 4.4) features where no one has software out that uses it yet. These are features that HAVE existed, and are BEING used and NOT having them can be a major issue depending on the software.

[Vim_User]

'Support' is a pretty... iffy phrasing. Red Hat's good about backporting kernel / mesa features from future releases back into 'stable' releases. Ubuntu has gotten BETTER about it via the "Service Pack" updates for LTS's but the user has to manually install those, they aren't automatic updates. Debian's the worst because they just arbitrarily call something 'stable' and then backport only bug fixes. The exception being MAYBE backports but I'm not even sure if Backports handle kernel and mesa updates.

Debian does only backport security updates, not bugfixes to the Stable branch. Newer kernels are available via the backports repository, Mesa (currently?) not.

Also what kind of update are you doing that 'bricks your system' ...? Unless you're on fairly old hardware where things don't get tested a kernel releases probably isnt gonna brick your system... Mesa same deal, if you're using one of the 'tier 1' (intel, radeon, nouveau) drivers an update shouldn't break things because they get tons of testing. Xorg updates... X in the past has broken things on hardware but the devs seem to have gotten better about it.

I am pretty sure he means a bricked OS, not bricked hardware. Just do a websearch for "Ubuntu update gone wrong" or something similar.

Also its not even an issue of "I dont want to update every 6months." Even Fedora gives you 18 months of updates from date of release, Ubuntu gives 2 years if I remember right...

Fedora has a support cycle of 13 months (or better until current version+2 is released + 1 month), Ubuntu has 5 years for LTS versions and 9 months for interim versions.