2009/10/21 Máirín Duffy <duffy(a)fedoraproject.org>:
Hardware incompatibility is a fact of life for that, and that's okay. I
don't think we should wait until the end of time for those issues to be
sorted out. But if we know Nvidia cards tend to cause a bad experience,
couldn't we have detected the card early on, and maybe presented some
kind of, 'Hey, you've got this piece of hardware. It might cause you
some issues. You might want to check this wiki page (or whatever) for a
list of common problems and workarounds for this card. Sorry that this
had to make your experience with us a little bumpy, but let's get you
around it!'
Well...it's tricky because this stuff changes so rapidly, and we may
simply not know how well a particular card works with a particular
version of the driver. Then of course multiply that matrix by
configuration like multihead...
I guess a lot comes down to the details. Are we just special casing
PCI vendor == nvidia? Or something more elaborate?
Graphics is especially tricky, because linking to a wiki page is
obviously problematic if the driver is failing entirely, since you
wouldn't be able to see our error page...
In the end graphics just has to work. I think we should spend time on
big picture issues that impact all users (e.g. root password, upgrade
experience); there's a lot of great work going on by all accounts in
the nouveau driver, and it's likely F12 would work better for him
already.
Same with the anaconda crashes he was having in the partitioning
screen.
Apparently it was a known issue:
How could we expect him to know to even look for the known issues wiki
page? How would he know it existed?
This one is much more targeted would probably be fairly easy to do.
Doesn't anaconda already have a crash handler that submits to
bugzilla? We'd just need a link on the bugzilla page for anaconda to
its common bugs list in the wiki.