[wellylug] Is SUSE a desktop distro? (AARRGGHH!)

[Donald Gordon]

On Sat, 25 Sep 2004 00:34:15 -0700
Ian Sterling <xyverz at gmail.com> wrote:

> > people wouldn't go around recommending nVidia because "they've got good
> > Linux support", though -- closed drivers != good Linux support, IMHO.
> 
> I'm sorry, but I really don't agree with you on this.  In the past, it
> was indeed a pain to install the nvidia drivers.  However, for the
> last six or twelve months, nvidia's had the wonderful installer
> they've been making available to the average joe user.  All one needs
> to do is (as root)
> 
> sh /path/to/NVIDIAdrivers.bin

And how is this better than your distro being able to include the
drivers, autodetect your card type, and "just work"?

At the moment, because nVidia refuse to provide decent open drivers, if
Joe User doesn't know that there are downloadable drivers out there,
then they'll get stuck with the much inferior 2D-only drivers, and
probably conclude that their less than wonderful graphics performance is
due to Linux, rather than their GPU manufacturer's driver licensing
policies.

> Don't get me wrong, your arguments may certainly be valid, but I
> certainly don't agree with them.  I'm of the mind that NOT everything
> must be open source.   I'm willing to use a closed-source product if
> it does the job BETTER than the open-sourced equivalent.

I don't think that everything must be free software, either.  But I like
the stuff that gets shoehorned into kernelspace on my Linux boxes to be
GPL-compatible (and hopefully part of the official kernel source), and
debuggable by people other than the hardware manufacturer.

donald