Terry Barnaby wrote:
Although I understand Fedora's frontier status, I think the
graphics
system changes could probably have been handled better. After the kernel
and core shared libraries the graphics system is probably the next
essential core OS subsystem (At least for desktop systems). It seems most
of peoples stability issues with fedora stem from graphics. I do
understand the difficulty with the multitude of different graphics
chipsets out there. But this is where Fedora could shine with its close
links to upstream development. It would have been good to be very upfront
with this and get a group to define and setup some basic graphics tests
and loudly promote users to perform tests with these both pre-release and
post-release. This with a website with test status versus graphics
board/chipsets and with good easy linkages to Bugzilla (more user
friendly) and perhaps a separate graphics-testing repository to keep quick
graphics updates away from the "stable" release etc. If enough upstream
developers, Fedora packagers and testing users were in on this I think
great inroads into getting stable and good graphics systems would be made
in a relatively short time.
Unfortunately, a sizeable portion of our users installs some crappy
proprietary driver, sometimes not even a properly packaged one, but using
some broken installation script directly from the hardware vendor's website,
making this all moot. :-( While it is true that our Free drivers are far
from perfect as well, most graphics-related problems are actually due to
proprietary drivers. Just say NO to proprietary drivers! (And in fact this
is one of the reasons why our drivers are a bit on the experimental side,
it's needed to get support for as much hardware as possible with our Free
drivers, e.g. there's now experimental 3D support for Nouveau in F13.)
Kevin Kofler