radeon driver heading in wrong direction :-(.

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Sunday 31 January 2010 18:54:17 you wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-01-31 at 16:35 +0000, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> 
> ===================================================
> 
> > > I'm using the same binary driver as you are.
> 
> ===================================================
> 
> Do take notice that I -am- using the nVidia binary drivers.

Consider the notice taken. ;-)

> Far worse, as we are all using the nVidia driver instead of helping the
> Nouveau debug their driver, if/when thing go horribly wrong, switching
> to Nouveau driver will be extremely painful to say the least.
> 
> As I said before, like me, you can choose to use binary drivers, but
> keep in mind that by doing it, were all slowly cutting the branch from
> under our collective feet.

Yes, I agree basically. In the long run, it would of course be much better to 
have a working open source driver for nVidia. But remember that things can go 
horribly wrong even with open source drivers (Intel in F10 time springs to 
mind), so that's not a big assurance.

That said, I don't feel the current F12 switch to nouveau to be so extremely 
painful. Ok, the driver is not ready yet for 3D, but 2D support is there and 
works quite well, AFAIK. And the driver is being developed very very actively 
--- I'm monitoring the nouveau mailing list, and can see new bugfixes and 
patches *literally* every day. It looks very promising and I believe 3D will 
be RE'd and functional sooner than people expect. On some cards it already 
works --- as reported, Compiz already works (with minor issues) on nv40 and 
nv50 generations. Take a look at

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FrontPage#Status

and

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix

Best, :-)
Marko