F12: 30 second freeze when accessing certain panel items ?

[Kevin Kofler]

Linuxguy123 wrote:
> We don't have to be stuck at all.  Developers could be limited to using
> features that WORK on the proprietary driver UNTIL nouveau is ready.
> Once nouveau is ready then they can do whatever they want.

The problem is that developers DON'T KNOW what doesn't work with the 
proprietary driver. They'd have to be running the driver to know it, and 
that's not going to be possible on my machines with Intel or ATI/AMD 
graphics. I intentionally don't have any NVidia graphics card. And even for 
those that DO run the NVidia driver, those things might actually work for 
them. Those bugs are highly dependent on the driver version, often also on 
the precise graphics hardware (there are many different NVidia chipsets out 
there, exercising different code paths in the driver), sometimes also on 
other stuff (e.g. the version of the X.Org X11 server). The developers are 
NOT out there to intentionally break your NVidia (even I won't do that, as 
much as I'd love to), they just have no way to know what driver bugs their 
code could trigger. Often it is quite innocuous code which triggers bugs.

> For an nvidia specific example, remember when folder view locked the
> computer when it was used on a machine with the proprietary nvidia
> driver ?  That was in F10 and nouveau was extemely new at that point !
> Not only that, but folderview was the only way to display folders on the
> desktop at that point !

Nobody intentionally made the folder view trigger a bug in the nvidia 
driver, it just happened by accident. But of course developers are not 
willing to cripple their code to work around a driver bug, the bug needs to 
be fixed in the proper place (the driver). The KDE developers usually react 
the same way when they trigger a bug in a Free driver. That you don't see 
this happening is just due to Free drivers having fewer and less severe 
bugs.

> KK recommends not buying a laptop with an nvidia card.  NICE TRY !  Have
> you shopped for a laptop lately ? Its not like you have a choice of one
> card versus another in the same model line once you pick the brand,
> screen, processor, etc.

That's why you pick the graphics card/chip (and the wireless chipset) FIRST, 
before looking at any other characteristic. I did that when I bought my 
laptop (though for the model I ended up choosing, I DID in fact have the 
choice between Intel or NVidia graphics; needless to say, I picked Intel! 
It's working perfectly: 3D, kernel modesetting etc. just work). Especially 
for the brand, you should be flexible and pick the vendor which integrates 
the hardware you actually want.

> And yet when you ask them to fix bugs against nouveau or provide a GUI for
> changing the display setup (which I do just about every day...) its not
> there.

Log files are essential to debug driver issues, it's normal that bugs only 
get looked at if you provide them.

As for that GUI, that's what the Display section of System Settings is for.

        Kevin Kofler