What Kind Of People Use X.Org's VESA Driver?

[DirtyHairy]

I second Rah - why do most people here sound like people using VESA are short of being retards? Phoronix can sing the praise of the vendor specific drivers as long as they wish, experience shows that it doesn't always work as expected, and there are many machines out there on which both open and close source drivers for ATI/NVIDIA/INTEL/etc. turn out to be unstable. In addition, in many drivers some aspects of 2D acceleration are broken and actually sometimes hamper performance. Believe it or not, most people use linux for production work and don't care about 3D, and if the hardware specific drivers don't work, it's easier to just use the VESA driver than to start fiddling around. At university where I work, some desktops are running VESA exactly for this reason and, guess what: the difference in ordinary 2D work is hardly noticable.

[Kano]

I certainly know ppl who used vesa, most of em i helped to use the correct one instead. Usually only 1280x1024 or 1024x768 is used when there are displays with other sizes. Of course you can try 915res and hack your id and try to use other res instead but that really should be no permanent solution.

[Adarion]

...Haiku...
Haiku's Vesa driver is surprising fast and can do 3D (sort of) and play multiple videos simultaneously without much trouble.

Wow. I'd like to have such a VESA driver. Would make life easier.

[unix_epoch]

I sometimes use the VESA driver on my 2001-laptop-turned-carpc when the mach64 driver is broken (oddly enough for a car PC, I run Gentoo on it and like constantly updating things).

[BlackStar]

I certainly know ppl who used vesa, most of em i helped to use the correct one instead. Usually only 1280x1024 or 1024x768 is used when there are displays with other sizes.

Not to mention that VESA sucks on any kind of CRT, as it's locked at 60Hz no matter what you try to do.

(Yes, there are still people using CRTs out there!)

[Kano]

Informer i patched a ati 9700 card with a bios editor to raise the refresh rate in vesa modes to 85 hz - no idea if that is still possible with newer cards. However i own a tft now...

[Smorg]

I use the vesa driver on a laptop with a broken GPU (nvidia 420 go) which causes severe artifacts with vertical lines, but is still usable as a server and backup machine as the display is still visible (sorta). Any attempt to enable acceleration will hard lock it, so I use vesa on that box.

[sabriah]

I have used the vesa drivers "as a last resort", when other drivers had been messed with and I didn't know what else to use. And, due to lack of time to fix the system I have had them in use far longer than expected, once several weeks.

The vesa drivers are almost like ASCII, very simple but is always understood.

[LinuxAffenMann]

I'm using the VESA driver because I got one of those infamous Nvidia screw-up GPUs - hardware acceleration = freeze. I could use Nouveau and turn off hw accel, but the VESA driver is giving me better performance. Will get a new notebook soon, but for now I have to stick to this: http://img.xrmb2.net/images/662916.jpeg

[curaga]

I use vesa on one computer because the Sis chip / driver is total crap. Corruption, crashes, not much better performance than vesa even when it works.