Fedora 37 Considering Removal Of Legacy X.Org Drivers

[Danielsan]

Removing older and legacy code is an issue that belongs only to distros that have employees working on, is Fedora a community distro or anything else?

[Fuchs]

Red Hat has a fairly collaborative relationship with Nvidia and have worked together on several projects involved with Fedora before. Here is a recent example:

[... bloob bloob bloob]

Unfortunately doesn't address my points at all, and:

https://twitter.com/mattdm/status/1510664957465178118

oops, that is ... the leader of the fedora project?

So it isn't accurate to say that anyone is yelling or surprised. When a third party vendor gets a heads up on changes in a distribution, they can put it on their backlog but may not prioritize it without a major distribution with a release out first and then it becomes a chicken and egg issue. Sometimes driver issues affects a subset of hardware and Fedora developers have to make a tradeoff that involves a substantial reduction of the burden of legacy driver issues and free up limited resources to work on more forward facing projects or put off the change for later. Both has happened in the past with Fedora and Nvidia drivers over the years.

So what birdie wrote is accurate, and if you don't have hardware / drivers from a vendor that fedora likes, you might just as well have bad luck and end up with a not or only partially usable system. Exactly what we criticized, and exactly why commenting on such a proposed change that there is a well founded fear of exactly this happening is understandable. And no, fedora can't blame it on "chicken egg" or "but nvidia" or "bad proprietary driver", it was their decision to change that kernel config, it could have been kept at zero cost, other distributions manage with zero cost, so it is them playing politics on top of their users.

Glad we agree.

[RahulSundaram]

https://twitter.com/mattdm/status/1510664957465178118

oops, that is ... the leader of the fedora project?

Sure, it is and it is a good summary of the issues involved. If you view this as yelling, I don't think we will see agreement, moving on.

[sinepgib]

Removing older and legacy code is an issue that belongs only to distros that have employees working on, is Fedora a community distro or anything else?

How about no? Community distros are made by devs who are in their damn right to decide what they support and what they don't. Support takes work. If you don't pay someone, you can't tell them what to do. It's quite the opposite, then, corporate distros are supposed to support hardware for as long as their LTS is alive, because there's a paying customer involved.

[Fuchs]

Sure, it is and it is a good summary of the issues involved. If you view this as yelling, I don't think we will see agreement, moving on.

Oh, okay, so fedora disabling a kernel configuration that is knowingly needed for stuff to work with nvidia is the fault of nvidia, and birdie expressing concern that a similar change for fedora 37 could have similar issues to one that fedora 36 has is non-warranted.

Yeah, I guess we won't find agreement indeed, but I also think you can no longer argument that this fear is non-warranted and that there is both a good relationship between fedora and nvidia and yet it is all nvidia's fault.

I guess if that is a contributors view, then it really is no surprise that users have to suffer.

[NateHubbard]

Sure, it is and it is a good summary of the issues involved. If you view this as yelling, I don't think we will see agreement, moving on.

He's pretty obviously playing politics here. I'm kind of ok with that, since the real issue is nvidia itself, but let's not pretend this is something else.

[RahulSundaram]

Removing older and legacy code is an issue that belongs only to distros that have employees working on, is Fedora a community distro or anything else?

That's a silly thing to say. Every single distribution has to deal with the issue of removing older and legacy code. Arch dropped official support for 32 bit architecture in 2017 for example. Community isn't a magical thing, regardless of whether that community is a bunch of employees or volunteers, resources are always finite. Eventually legacy code gets dropped.

[RahulSundaram]

birdie expressing concern that a similar change for fedora 37 could have similar issues to one that fedora 36 has is non-warranted

No, I specifically have already told birdie "Concerns about compatibility issues or regressions on any changes like these are certainly valid". My first response was primarily around calling experienced Xorg developers as enemies of the community and to inform him of the fallback plan, he has taken that into account, pulled back on the language and is apparently willing to work on testing the changes in good faith. So we are all good there.

[Fuchs]

No, I specifically have already told birdie "Concerns about compatibility issues or regressions on any changes like these are certainly valid". My first response was primarily around calling experienced Xorg developers as enemies of the community and to inform him of the fallback plan, he has taken that into account, pulled back on the language and is apparently willing to work on testing the changes in good faith. So we are all good there.

Well, I'd gladly point out otherwise, unfortunately you seem to have the habit of editing your posts to match whatever you like later. So this is a bit pointless I guess.

[RahulSundaram]

Well, I'd gladly point out otherwise, unfortunately you seem to have the habit of editing your posts to match whatever you like later. So this is a bit pointless I guess.

I don't know what you want to point out exactly but you and birdie did quote me exactly on my first response directly

"Tldr: Despite the inflammatory language here, developers who have worked on Xorg are not enemies of the community. There is a fallback in place"

So, my edits here are a red-herring.