Will The Free Software Desktop Ever Make It?

[Remco]

What about a blob that doesn't break and actually works? Like we have on Windows, for example.

It still breaks, just not as often. In theory. If you're lucky. My sister was not so lucky, and had to use the extremely slow fallback driver on a powerful Nvidia card. The only solution? Buy another laptop. Ubuntu ran fine, but she'd rather see a slideshow of Windows than use that.

[Shining Arcanine]

That is all fine and well but the vast majority of end users would rather not deal with such headaches. Your choice is not the choice that would be made by almost every end user out there.

I would like to say that I use Gentoo Linux and I love it. I have recently been playing with FreeBSD and if you don't like having an OS that is source based first and compiled second, then FreeBSD is a good option.

[RealNC]

Quote Originally Posted by RealNC View Post
What about a blob that doesn't break and actually works? Like we have on Windows, for example.

It still breaks, just not as often. In theory. If you're lucky. My sister was not so lucky, and had to use the extremely slow fallback driver on a powerful Nvidia card. The only solution? Buy another laptop. Ubuntu ran fine, but she'd rather see a slideshow of Windows than use that.

I can come up with corner cases all day long, including open drivers that break on Linux. My sister couldn't use her Ubuntu laptop that had an Intel GMA 4something on it. Only SVGA driver worked. Windows had no problem.

So what was your point?

[Remco]

I can come up with corner cases all day long, including open drivers that break on Linux. My sister couldn't use her Ubuntu laptop that had an Intel GMA 4something on it. Only SVGA driver worked. Windows had no problem.

So what was your point?

The development cycle of Windows is slower. Glacial development = less breakage.

[Shining Arcanine]

The development cycle of Windows is slower. Glacial development = less breakage.

Having the benefit of manufacturers designing their hardware for the default drivers and having nearly all of their software engineers work on specialized drivers to replace the default drivers is likely a better explanation for that.

[?John?]

Another anti-blob argument

What about a blob that doesn't break and actually works? Like we have on Windows, for example.

It still breaks, just not as often. In theory. If you're lucky. My sister was not so lucky, and had to use the extremely slow fallback driver on a powerful Nvidia card. The only solution? Buy another laptop.

2 RealNC: See what I mean? I have a huge problem exactly with those "In theory." and "If you're lucky." parts (by the way, that's exactly why Winblow$ sucks so much), with libre drivers being no exception.
Despite of what you seem to think, the breakage can occur in any OS and notice it actually happens all the time because all it takes is the blob containing enough quick&dirty hacks (which they undoubtedly do because vendors rely on "good enough" practices to maximize their profits).
If the old drivers don't work (and they won't if the environment has changed enough) you either get stuck with bitroting OS or you're forced to needlessly upgrade your hardware.
I'm not denying that both blobs and libre drivers are fixable, but only as long as someone is willing to do that and the real catch always becomes the "willing" part.
For example, try making AMD fix fglrx 9.3 (the last version before GPUs up to R500 generation got dropped) - if they don't meet your demands (for whatever reason), you're just completely screwed since you have nobody else to turn to.

I can come up with corner cases all day long, including open drivers that break on Linux.

So what was your point?

Exactly this. But unlike with blobs, you can actually do something about malfunctioning libre drivers.

[marek]

Discussion that ends up without a plan to make a difference is pointless. I might as well spend that time talking to my dying grandmother. At least that has some worth.

Amen, bro.

[curaga]

Yes. They are too late. But they are here and they work fantastically up to r500 hardware. This hardware CANNOT DO hardware decoding of video or OpenGL3. It's complete.

I'll just correct this part. There has been an mpeg2 MC chip onboard ever since the Rage II+dvd. Since the advertised decode capabilities have only increased since then, and any programmable shaders did not appear until the R300, there's lots of hardware with decoding chips.

I'm also under the impression that mpeg2 MC is very similar to the MC of xvid and theora, so it could probably be used to help those too. And this is just the MC chip, the later hw has idct (can be used for jpeg decoding etc) and whatnot chips as well.

[yogi_berra]

Really, the idiocy i see here is astounding. You people actually are really working hard on claiming that this is exactly how it should be. Go back to windows and apple guys, all of you.

To be fair, it would be impossible to justify the $7,000(US) yearly support contracts if everything worked perfectly the way you wanted.

[cynical]

If by "make it" you mean have a majority share of the market, well it isn't going to happen as long as you need to install it yourself or have someone help you. And by this I mean it isn't going to happen until OEMs take it seriously and install/configure it by default for the masses. Unfortunately microsoft likes to dangle cheap windows volume licensing in front of them to keep them in line so I don't really see it happening. At this point though, the support is good enough for me so I could care less. Fuck the masses.