A very misleading and inaccurate title...
Fedora is not "abandoning" those drivers at all. The current maintainer of the packages has said he's ORPHANING them, which allows someone else with the time to ADOPT them.
Fedora isn't removing the packages from the distribution.
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Fedora 21 Will Try To Abandon Non-KMS GPU Drivers
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Originally posted by Kivada View PostOk, so what happens when you open up a web browser?
Originally posted by Kivada View PostJust getting a desktop and maybe a very small .doc file open in Abiword isn't enough to justify the power draw over replacing it with a modern 3.9-18w nettop that is faster at everything.
If electricity bills and IT equipment are paid from different budgets (which is the case in many schools), organizations are even interested in prolonging life of computers beyond where it would make sense if both came from the same budget. Back in the day, I helped a school run DOSVNC on 386s with 4 MB RAM and NE2000 ISA cards as cheap Internet terminals. Bonus, they could be left unsupervised and needed no theft deterrent.
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Originally posted by chithanh View PostWho says they need to handle Gnome shell? Driving a laptop panel at its native resolution, or being able to configure an external monitor would be a start.
Lightweight desktop environments like LXDE work fine even on a 15 year old machine with 256 MB RAM.
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Originally posted by curaga View PostIt's too bad that Kabini has a GCN GPU - that means the currently-worse-quality radeonsi over r600g.
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Originally posted by agd5f View PostAdditionally, you can't bang on hw directly from userspace on secureboot enabled systems.
Originally posted by agd5f View PostMoreover, XAA support was dropped from the xserver years ago so most of these drivers are completely unaccelerated.
Originally posted by agd5f View PostIf you want to use the older hardware, use an older distro or one that caters to older hardware.
Originally posted by agd5f View PostYou aren't missing out any anything ith the newer software stacks anyway since he older cards can't handle it. Do you really think an S3 virge in a 200 Mhz Pentium Pro can handle gnome shell or kwin, or even xfce?
Lightweight desktop environments like LXDE work fine even on a 15 year old machine with 256 MB RAM.
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Originally posted by chithanh View PostFortunately, and that is the reason for my previous post, is that drivers who are built from the same codebase (such as the Linux kernel, or the old monolithic X) will normally be updated along when an API changes. This prevents those drivers from bitrotting.
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Originally posted by bridgman View PostThis is the dark side of not having frozen APIs in Linux. Drivers pretty much have to have maintainers or they gradually fall behind and effectively die.
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It's too bad that Kabini has a GCN GPU - that means the currently-worse-quality radeonsi over r600g.
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Originally posted by cb88 View PostMakes sense to move hardware like that to using BSD... my tyan thunder 2 atx computer acutally has sound support there! And they are still supporting ancient hardware like acceleration support for SX graphics on SparcStations probably the oldest hardware capable of accelerating compositing -> http://my.opera.com/Macallan/blog/
The thing is though, why you would expect a distro geared toward modern hardware using apps that are likely far too heavy to run well on it, when you could just grab a specialized low end/old hardware distro.
Really though, unless you are dumpster diving for gear to restore and donate like I do the cost of running such old hardware is outweighed by the power savings of getting a system that draws 15w like an AMD A4-5000 board, it'll be faster at literally everything being a a quad core 64 bit CPU with an OpenGL4/OpenCL1.2 class GPU that already has OSS driver support.
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Originally posted by chithanh View PostThey are not abandoned, but their pace of development is slow. There were suggestions to integrate these drivers back into the X server like in the old monolithic days, which would maybe be the only long term way to deal with the problem.
This is the dark side of not having frozen APIs in Linux. Drivers pretty much have to have maintainers or they gradually fall behind and effectively die.
EDIT -- oh cool, I crossed 7,000 posts recently...Last edited by bridgman; 28 August 2013, 12:08 AM.
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