Muhah. Sorry Sir.
But every five years somebody, who claims (!) to be from VIA, shows up and tells the world that VIA still exists, but far better, that they still "are looking into things" related to Linux.
Seriously, if you are from VIA, then you should know by now (unless you were just freshly employed) that there is barely anything VIA does in regards of Linux (or BSD). Besides cheap promises, maybe.
I have followed that for about 12 years now (since the introduction of the CLE266, and using KT133a before on my Socket A) and nothing really happened. Besides cheap promises. The hardware itself may fit the purpose but without decent drivers it is useless.
It would not even be a horror if VIA had no Linux expertise. There had (!) been enough enthusiasts out there wanting to write drivers. But I guess they were scared off by the lack of documentation and communication.
From the user perspective we now had 3 or more generations of drivers. The last one, openchrome slowly starts to rot in its repository. There was never ever 3d, power management seemed to be unknown (does the HW have features for that anyway?) and 2d was of varying quality. MPEG acceleration would or would not work or with artifacts. Not all outputs were supported, so this was a killer for the use in notebooks when you wanted to attach it to a beamer for a presentation. Had to fall back to vesa.
So from the user perspective it isn't any better.
But every five years somebody, who claims (!) to be from VIA, shows up and tells the world that VIA still exists, but far better, that they still "are looking into things" related to Linux.
Seriously, if you are from VIA, then you should know by now (unless you were just freshly employed) that there is barely anything VIA does in regards of Linux (or BSD). Besides cheap promises, maybe.
I have followed that for about 12 years now (since the introduction of the CLE266, and using KT133a before on my Socket A) and nothing really happened. Besides cheap promises. The hardware itself may fit the purpose but without decent drivers it is useless.
It would not even be a horror if VIA had no Linux expertise. There had (!) been enough enthusiasts out there wanting to write drivers. But I guess they were scared off by the lack of documentation and communication.
From the user perspective we now had 3 or more generations of drivers. The last one, openchrome slowly starts to rot in its repository. There was never ever 3d, power management seemed to be unknown (does the HW have features for that anyway?) and 2d was of varying quality. MPEG acceleration would or would not work or with artifacts. Not all outputs were supported, so this was a killer for the use in notebooks when you wanted to attach it to a beamer for a presentation. Had to fall back to vesa.
So from the user perspective it isn't any better.
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