On Sat, 2010-03-20 at 07:14 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
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!
This isn't really true. Or at least, not a productive perspective for
improving Fedora. There are certainly a lot of bugs in the open drivers
shipped with Fedora, and there's a lot of work to do to fix them all. I
sent my own reply to Terry explaining how we're handling this at
present, but just waving the 'it's all NVIDIA's fault' stick at the
problem won't make it go away :)
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net