On Tue, 1 Mar 2005, Dave Jones wrote:
On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 02:45:22AM +0100, Dag Wieers wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Mar 2005, Dave Jones wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 01:24:58AM +0100, Dag Wieers wrote:
> > > On Tue, 1 Mar 2005, Jamie Zawinski wrote:
> > >
> > > > Also, more people run screen savers than tuxracer, so that's
where the
> > > > video driver crashes tend to occur. Then they blame me and I am
sad.
> > >
> > > Hehe, I've had several people complain about 'random'
crashes, usually
> > > when they arrived at work in the morning or came back from coffee. All
of
> > > them related to 3D screensavers :)
> > >
> > > Maybe disabling 3D screensavers by default (and/or a warning about the
> > > potential to crash when people open the screensaver configuration) would
> > > reduce the uncomfortable (unstable) feeling people got when using Linux
in
> > > these cases.
> >
> > Or how about just fixing the drivers so they don't lock up ?
>
> People first have to know why it crashes before they know where to report
> it. The anecdotes I gave was to indicate that people usually don't know
> why it crashed and in return have a general feeling of unstability.
>
> I would like to make sure that 1) these people don't have an uncomfortable
> feeling and 2) understand that enabling 3D has a potential to crash a
> system, so people might realise why it happens and where to report it.
The problem is a "turning on this feature may crash you computer" dialog is
enough
to scare away a majority of users. Lowering the amount of testing something
gets lowers the possibility of it ever getting reported, and subsequently fixed.
I agree, though it probably depends on the exact wordings, it could be
prefixed with: "Don't panic", in large friendly letters. :)
-- dag wieers, dag(a)wieers.com,
http://dag.wieers.com/ --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]