Kristian Talks About The Wayland Display Server

[smitty3268]

When I hear "good enough that users will keep the default", I immediately think of IE. And that's not something you want to bring to mind.

I think there's a difference here, though. IE just sucks at everything compared to it's competition, while the OSS drivers should have a significant edge over the binary ones in at least a few areas. So with the drivers it's more of a tradeoff where you have to pick out what matters the most to you.

[bridgman]

Hmm, sounds like "good enough" has bad connotations for you. That was not my intent when using the term - I meant it literally, ie that it meets your needs. For most people "good" is a point on the continuum between sucky and spectacular whereas "good enough" is relative to their requirements.

Two generations of advertising have twisted us into believing that "good" is for losers and the only things worth having are "excellent" or better, and it may take another couple of generations to undo the damage. That's another reason for using "good enough" rather than "good"

The car analogy is problematic, since there are other reasons than speed to drive the "nice car". A more accurate analogy might be two identical cars, one with a governor set to 125% of the highest speed limit in your area and another with a governor set to 150%. In normal use you would neither see a difference nor care about it.

Anyways, that's what "good enough" means to the open source developers. "Satisfying" would probably work as well.

[misiu_mp]

I hate having to get pedantic but there's a pattern going on here. One person talks about open source drivers being "good enough", then another person replaces "good enough" with "sucks" or "slow" (ie words with completely different meanings) then disagrees with the original statement.

Arguably there might be some right in doing so. After all 'good enough' feels less good than 'good'. 'Good enough' for some people, is more likely to be not good enough for more demanding people than a thing that is 'just good' or 'very good' (think normal distribution). The key is to achieve a 'good' value so that the displeased are a small enough percentile.

Besides 'good enough' does sound like something you really are not pleased with, or expect not to be pleased with in the future.

"I would really like to drive dad's Koenigsegg, but he only lets me drive the VW. Well I guess thats 'good enough'. After all it will take me from A to B and I cant drive faster than 90 anyway."

Maybe we should use the term 'satisfying'. It seems less prone to erosion.

a midrange card running open source drivers will normally be quite a bit faster than an entry level card running binary drivers.

I certainly hope so.

[d2kx]

I am the king of the world, baby!

I completely agree with the post above. I was a bit worried when I thought of how the opensource drivers may reach 75% of the binary's performance at best, but to be honest, I rather buy a new VGA (and maybe get even more performance) than to keep my old one and continue on using proprietary drivers. It will be very interesting to see how games like ETQW will run when the Gallium3D drivers are in a good shape in late 2010/2011.

[bridgman]

I hate having to get pedantic but there's a pattern going on here. One person talks about open source drivers being "good enough", then another person replaces "good enough" with "sucks" or "slow" (ie words with completely different meanings) then disagrees with the original statement. Unless everyone just enjoys arguing we're going to have to be very careful with choice (and substitution) of words.

I'll toss out a sample definition for discussion :

If a driver plays the games a user normally wants to play, at the native resolution of their display, at the refresh rate of their display, a lot of people consider that "good enough". The fact that another driver can play the same game at 377 FPS doesn't make much difference because the display can't show the additional frames anyways.

Within a generation of GPUs there is typically a 3:1 performance jump between GPUs in the same family, or ~9:1 from top to bottom. That difference swamps any difference between drivers, ie a midrange card running open source drivers will normally be quite a bit faster than an entry level card running binary drivers.

What's missing right now is support for some GL features which either prevent games from running or force them to slower code paths - and adding support for those features is pretty much the top priority for the devs working on 3D code today.

[misiu_mp]

i think xf86-video-ati is already a decent out of the box experience.

most people don't require fast 3d. in their case opensource radeon driver is perfectly fine.

I disagree. Linux graphics will never be taken seriously with slow 3d drivers.

[misiu_mp]

Wayland, Gallium3D, OpenGL 2.1/3.0...cool concepts, but with progress like this we will never see useful graphics or good productivity done on Linux.

You mean the development is too slow? I think its just getting momentum. With wayland we are really close. Now it just needs to be taken seriously by the rest of the community and the industry. Otherwise it looks quite down the hill...

[smitty3268]

While I find the Phoronix survey's pretty interesting, it's important to keep in mind that they're highly biased (because the respondents are self selected) and not scientific. They represent the small minority of folks who actually read Phoronix and care enough to respond, not the much larger majority that doesn't worry about the minute details of what's going on in the graphics world.

I would imagine that's one explanation for why binary blobs might be oversampled - that the people who are reading Phoronix tend to care more about 3D performance and getting good hardware than the average user. Or maybe not, the point is we really can't know.

[deanjo]

Deanjo, what the survey outputs do not show is clustering or correlation between features, ie someone interested in A also values C highly, while someone interested in B doesn't value A so highly on average. You really need to pull out clusters of users with common sets of interests and look at that output before you can say whether survey results favour a single binary driver vs a combination of binary and open source drivers.

Combining all of the responses into a single graph does give some useful information, but it also misses a lot of important information about individual users and which combination of features they value the most.

Sure but again you are not thinking of a whole. Graphs such as these even though they don't give a combination for a individual they still reflect as to what are the most desired features. Nvidia for example gathered a whole shitload of otherwise non-nvidia followers with the simple introduction of vdpau and look it is one of the most desirable features in the graph, people also desire great openGL performance look that is also a strength in nvidia's blobs. If you look at the graph it looks like really the only one paying attention to it was nvidia as their focus this last year has been in many of the features listed, one only has to take a look at their vast change logs to see this. Vdpau for example is a pure consumer driven feature that was added and it's support exploded everywhere. In my software company features and requests are handled on a "desired" basis by a simple number of our clients requesting it. The ones with the highest votes get first attention and because of it we get sunshine thrown our way from our target audience, the end user. It really is that simple.

Besides, "ease of installation and maintenance" is one of those self-biasing questions. Anyone in a position where they would value ease of installation and maintenance at the time they fill out the survey probably couldn't bring up a web browser anyways

I don't buy that at all as those same people would be more then likely also using another OS to do their surfing (oh ya in those other OS's with a full feature driven set of drivers where again they are using them because they work despite not being opensource) and I guarantee you that people that have a hard time clicking a 1 click install or even a one liner for a blob driver will still have issues trying to upgrade their free desktop system to get the latest feature/support.

[bridgman]

[insert obligatory reference to MSIE history]

@bridgman: What I think deanjo sees as a problem with that is that many linux users have many important aspects and having both enables the situation where one driver sucks at aspect #1 while the other sucks at aspect #2. And it's not just when one of the aspects is openness.

OK, I'm not following this at all. "Good enough" and "sucks" are not the same thing

It's not only that myxal, but when you look at what developers consider high priority vs what the end user wants to see, ease of installation and maintenance is not a high priority. It's features that they can use such as openGL performance and video playback.

Deanjo, what the survey outputs do not show is clustering or correlation between features, ie someone interested in A also values C highly, while someone interested in B doesn't value A so highly on average. You really need to pull out clusters of users with common sets of interests and look at that output before you can say whether survey results favour a single binary driver vs a combination of binary and open source drivers.

Combining all of the responses into a single graph does give some useful information, but it also misses a lot of important information about individual users and which combination of features they value the most.

That reminds me, I forgot to ask if "playing Windows games" could be added to the "key interests" list. Next year, I guess.

Besides, "ease of installation and maintenance" is one of those self-biasing questions. Anyone in a position where they would value ease of installation and maintenance at the time they fill out the survey probably couldn't bring up a web browser anyways

EDIT - wasn't this thread supposed to be about Wayland ?