The entire premise of your article is false
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| mschwartz Sep 29, 2008 12:12 AM EDT |
It's not that Fedora is not making drivers available for ATI and nVidia cards, it is that ATI and nVidia don't allocate the required development resources to provide suitable, stable Linux drivers with superior performance for their cards. And...with nVidia's recently announced layoffs, don't be surprised if nVidia's Linux support only gets worse. This is not unique to Fedora, it is a problem for all Linux distributions. It does not matter if one distro or another makes it easy to install the drivers via a GUI or the CLI, if the drivers fundamentally don't work. It does not matter to me whether the drivers are open source or proprietary. I just want them to work. The problem is that under Linux, they don't. They don't work reliably and the performance generally stinks. Just peruse the ATI and nVidia Linux forums to see just how problematic their Linux drivers are, even for their current high end cards. Poor general performance, video artifacts, lousy 2D performance, memory leaks and all kinds of issues, just for routine day to day use. And, for those of use who have cards that are a few years old, we are relegated to the legacy support process, which means no support. Forget improvements and bug fixes, some of which have been in place for months. There are no development resources available. You want to influence the availability of video drivers for Linux? Buy Intel GPUs. Open source drivers are available for their GPUs and they work just fine in large measure for all but the most intensive 3D/OpenGL games. They are not perfect to be sure, but there is the ability for the community to be actively involved in open development and testing. Intel has 40% of the GPU market, which is what ATI and nVidia have combined. Let your wallet do the talking and buy computers with Intel GPU's. That is the power of the marketplace. Either ATI and nVidia will step up to compete, or they will lose the few percentage points of Linux market share that they have. My next laptop will have an Intel GPU. I won't be buying nVidia or ATI for the foreseeable future until they show me that they are committed to the Linux market with suitable drivers. Bottom line, this is not a Fedora specific issue. It is a Linux issue in general. N.B. I am not an Intel employee, just an increasingly frustrated nVidia customer. |
| Sander_Marechal Sep 29, 2008 2:03 AM EDT |
Quoting:You want to influence the availability of video drivers for Linux? Buy Intel GPUs. That means buying a new motherboard because Intel does not make stand-alone graphics cards like ATI and Nvidia do. |
| herzeleid Sep 29, 2008 2:25 AM EDT |
I've heard talk that intel is getting back into the video card business... |
| Sander_Marechal Sep 29, 2008 2:47 AM EDT |
I've heard that talk too, but until they actually start shipping cards it's not useful to me. I need a 3D card which can handle two monitors (for e.g. Blender) so I'm still forced to choose between Nvidia and ATI for now. |
| theboomboomcars Sep 29, 2008 9:46 AM EDT |
Quoting:Just peruse the ATI and nVidia Linux forums to see just how problematic their Linux drivers are, even for their current high end cards. I think you mean especially. The older cards tend to be better supported and more stable. It's been many moons since I have had any problems with my 7300GT. I can play 3d games, use compiz, watch videos. No problems. Though I long for the day that I can use an open driver. Though I may be able to get my hand on an ATI x850 and I think that the open drivers for that work fairly well. |
| mschwartz Sep 29, 2008 10:25 AM EDT |
@Sander_Marechal: For those of us with laptops, it means buying a whole new laptop. We don't have the option of just a new motherboard or just a new video card. Given that the intended lifespan of most laptops is 3 to 4 years, that leaves us stuck for a prolonged period of time. Right now, I am waiting on Dell to make a quad-core laptop (eg. Latitude series) that has an Intel 4500MHD GPU. They just announced a Precision class laptop model with a quad-core, but of course with an nVidia GPU. I am hopeful that such a beastie will be available before my extended warranty runs out early next year. If they don't and there are no other vendors with something similar, I may just have to make the plunge and wait for a quad core MacBook Pro with OSX. We are a Windows-free family, with my wife and kids all running Macs. I would have no problem getting my job done on that platform. I could dual boot OSX and Linux on the MacBook, but if they don't offer Intel GPUs (unlikely on the Pros) then I am back to the same situation as present. I have been running Linux since the RH 8.0 betas (circa 2001) and am now running F9. I truly want to stay with it, as the progression of desktop/laptop Linux over that time frame has been nothing short of phenomenal. But, I am frustrated enough at the moment with the current video driver situation to contemplate other options. |
| bigg Sep 29, 2008 11:13 AM EDT |
My wife recently bought a new laptop. She picked out the one that looked the best and had sufficient RAM and HD capacity (she's a Windows user who hates Vista but has no choice). I was pleased to see that it had both Intel graphics and wireless. So I had no problem with her spending more than we had budgeted to buy the thing (only about $800 with tax). Got it home, popped in a Mandriva live CD, everything worked. Wireless amounted to connecting to the network. Even the annoying special effects worked without problems. I'm going to test a gnewsense CD to see just how "Free" this laptop really is. |
| Sander_Marechal Sep 29, 2008 12:40 PM EDT |
Quoting:For those of us with laptops, it means buying a whole new laptop. True. But on the plus side, it's much easier to find a laptop with embedded Intel graphics than it is to find a motherboard with the same. Most motherboards seem to ship with ATI embedded, if they have an embedded 3D processor at all. |
| Sander_Marechal Sep 29, 2008 5:52 PM EDT |
Side note on graphics cards: If you use multiple monitors (or a laptop with external screen) and you can't get intel, get an (older, fully suppoted) ATI. I was just reading the gnome 2.24 release notes and found out that Nvidia doesn't support XRandR 1.2, so no good multi-monitor support. See http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Xorg_RandR_1.2 Boo Nvidia. |
| jhansonxi Sep 29, 2008 7:58 PM EDT |
The intel driver in Ubuntu Hardy and Fedora 9 is barely functional on 855GM chipsets. Messed up VTs, random lockups, and complete system freezes if you switch to the external VGA and don't have a monitor connected. It's a real downgrade from the i810 driver. |
| azerthoth Sep 30, 2008 12:52 AM EDT |
hmm, works fantastically on pendrivelinux (Mandriva), many different intel driven computers have seen that thumbdrive and the drivers (CF) have worked flawlessly every time. Perhaps it's not the driver thats buggy, but how the distro deals with it. |
| Sander_Marechal Sep 30, 2008 1:49 AM EDT |
It's because Ubuntu is built on Debian Testing. The intel driver in Debian used to be buggy as well, but it was fixed about two months ago. I guess Ubuntu still has the buggy version. |
| jezuch Sep 30, 2008 3:16 PM EDT |
Quoting:Ubuntu is built on Debian Testing Is it? I always thought it's a somewhat polished snapshot of sid... |
| tuxchick Sep 30, 2008 3:42 PM EDT |
Ubuntu pulls packages from as far upstream as Experimental. |
| Steven_Rosenber Sep 30, 2008 4:34 PM EDT |
The problem here is that none of us are doing anything exotic with our video equipment. There are only so many video cards and chipsets. There are only so many monitors with so many resolutions, refresh rates, etc. Why is it so hard to get X to work properly and be configured automatically? I've spent way too much time hacking at xorg.conf. |
| tuxchick Sep 30, 2008 4:47 PM EDT |
I agree with Steven. It's silly to still not have a decent graphical X configurator. I just spent some quality time with Ubuntu 8.04, and I swear it went backwards. They make it easy to install the NVidia drivers, but then when I tried to actually use them the graphical configuration thingy went wonky and disabled 3D acceleration, and set my 22" widescreen at 640x480. Mr. Magoo. 2D with the nv driver is no better- it maxes out at 1280xsomething. Silliness, when Xorg has supported high resolutions for years. |
| DiBosco Oct 01, 2008 3:57 AM EDT |
@Tuxchick Where is the difficulty in knocking up a graphical configurator? (This is not a sarcastic question.) I assume it's the setting of the values in xorg.conf itself and not the graphical end? I could knock up something in KDevelop using Qt without too much difficulty if someone was good at the text that goes in xorg.conf. Whenever I have played with xorg.conf I have generally broken it! Thinking about it, Mandriva has a graphics card/screen resolution program (XFdrake) that seems to work well but I don't think does dual monitors. I sometimes have to use nvidia-settings if I want to then set-up dual monitors or an external monitor with my laptop which generally works, but it can be very fiddly at times. Presumably, if you wanted something similar dual monitor-wise with non-nViidia cards, then you're into xorg.conf hacking? As in with the Acer Aspire One for example if you want to set-up for different resolutions with external monitors. Not sure how a Qt application would work on xfce. I'm rambling now... |
| gus3 Oct 01, 2008 12:14 PM EDT |
There are two problems with graphical X configurators: 1. If a very common X configuration (like super-dumb 640x480 VGA) doesn't work, you won't get a usable interface on the program, or worse, you could lock up the system. 2. Probing the hardware for display capabilities is, shall we say, less than trustworthy. http://www.gnome.org/~federico/news-2007-01.html#font-sizes (language warning) What Federico doesn't mention in his comments, is that DDC is sometimes incorrectly or incompletely implemented, and sometimes it returns completely wrong values. Apparently it happens often enough to be not usable. Add to this the "reviving older hardware" option where DDC is totally unavailable, and the result is a nightmare for both developers and support people. |
| techiem2 Oct 01, 2008 1:18 PM EDT |
Quoting:2. Probing the hardware for display capabilities is, shall we say, less than trustworthy. Exactly. We ran into this exact issue at the college when setting up a replacement control box for the digital sign. We replaced the old Acer 270 laptop with a nice little mini-computer with intel 645? graphics. X refused to read the display right. It would run the TV at 1024x768 no matter what we put in the xorg. Add to that the fact that the onboard video is actually a dual head controller and the cable has one dvi and one vga, and of course the VGA is the secondary, which is also the one we needed to use, and it was a major headache. Until I found the options to disable ddc and the first head and the commands to generate and test modelines and such. The tools are all there, there just doesn't seem to be a good graphical configurator to use them. |
| tuxchick Oct 01, 2008 1:31 PM EDT |
Quoting: Probing the hardware for display capabilities is, shall we say, less than trustworthy. And mere mortal human users have to do this when the GUI thingy fails. So as DiBosco and techiem said, this doesn't appear to be an insurmountable problem, just a neglected one on most distributions. |
| Sander_Marechal Oct 01, 2008 2:01 PM EDT |
Quoting:1. If a very common X configuration (like super-dumb 640x480 VGA) doesn't work, you won't get a usable interface on the program, or worse, you could lock up the system. This starts to happen more and more as high widescreen resolution LCD screens can't display 640x480. |
| jacog Oct 02, 2008 10:30 AM EDT |
Hmm, I think I like the Mandriva way of doing it. You have the option of logging into the video configuration thingy instead of the desktop. |
| Steven_Rosenber Oct 02, 2008 1:17 PM EDT |
I'm getting very close to loading Mandriva or PCLinuxOS ... |
| rijelkentaurus Oct 02, 2008 9:43 PM EDT |
Mandriva, this coming from a former PCLOS junkie. PCLOS is nice and very Mandriva-like, but the development seems to have slowed, it's not quite as stable and it doesn't have near the package list Mandriva does. I haven't even thought about reinstalling any other distro on my main laptop at home, I have been using 2008.1 since it came out six months ago...and six months is seriously about 3 times longer than the previous record! Don't get me wrong, PCLOS is a nice distro, but Mandriva is really kicking the snot out of anything else I have tried. Just my O. |
| Scott_Ruecker Oct 02, 2008 9:58 PM EDT |
I am a big fan of PCLOS right now, I have it dual booting with XP on my laptop and as the only OS on a desktop of mine, both have never given me so much as a hiccup. Easy to configure and easy to maintain. It has great hardware recognition and the wireless connection on my laptop has never once been an issue, unless I did it, which I have.. ;-) |
| rijelkentaurus Oct 02, 2008 10:48 PM EDT |
Compromise: Install one or the other, run the other in a VM to try it out, too! :) They both rock, as does Mepis. |
| DiBosco Oct 03, 2008 9:16 AM EDT |
I love the idea of kicking the snot out of something! I would echo the thoughts of rijelkentaraus, but having used Mandy since 2001 I am quite biased. ;~) PCLOS, to me, seemed like a less flexible version of Mandriva with a different package manager. I assume it doesn't have a team behind it like Mandriva does so simply doesn't have the resources to make so many improvements as Mandriva does with each release. |
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