Workstation and Basic Video Driver - Provide way to switch to the normal driver?

[Frantisek Zatloukal]

Hi,

recently, I've seen few users running Fedora with nomodeset. They didn't
know about that and were just complaining about poor resolution and/or
performance (and those systems worked just fine without nomodeset). Also,
sometimes, users choose basic video driver because something is broken, but
the broken state can change over time.

That led me to an idea - wouldn't it be better to provide some info for
users running Basic Video Driver that they're probably not getting the best
Fedora experience?

What came to my mind?

Having two GRUB entries for Fedora - with and without nomodeset. Users who
would install system while booted with nomodeset would see grub every time
with nomodeset option being default for the first time and then defaulting
to the last used entry.

Apart from this, there could be either notification (or window) shown every
time GNOME is launched with basic video driver, probably with some basic
information and link to Fedora Docs explaining what that does mean.

WDYT?

[Chris Murphy]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 9:37 AM Frantisek Zatloukal <fzatlouk(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  Hi,
>
>  recently, I've seen few users running Fedora with nomodeset. They didn't know
> about that and were just complaining about poor resolution and/or performance (and those
> systems worked just fine without nomodeset). Also, sometimes, users choose basic video
> driver because something is broken, but the broken state can change over time.
>
>  That led me to an idea - wouldn't it be better to provide some info for users running
> Basic Video Driver that they're probably not getting the best Fedora experience?
>
>  What came to my mind?
>
>  Having two GRUB entries for Fedora - with and without nomodeset. Users who would install
> system while booted with nomodeset would see grub every time with nomodeset option being
> default for the first time and then defaulting to the last used entry.
>
>  Apart from this, there could be either notification (or window) shown every time GNOME is
> launched with basic video driver, probably with some basic information and link to Fedora
> Docs explaining what that does mean.
>
>  WDYT? 
Or if the DE would inform the user that sub-optimal video settings are
being used. I think the description above is a bit complicated: a) the
usual case is GRUB menu is hidden by default; b) the GRUB menu is
already considered "busy" and there's a feature proposal to clean it
up [1]; c)  there would need to be creation of two bootloader .conf
files every time a kernel is installed, e.g.

*.conf file A would contain line

options $kernelopts

*.conf file B would contain line

options $kernelopts nomodeset

d) we'd have to change anaconda to no longer insert nomodeset into
GRUB boot parameters if the user selected it when booting to install;
otherwise they'll have two boot entries with nomodeset, and instead
Anaconda would presumably need to be taught how to set the one with
nomodeset as the default; last and not least, e) I think the graphics
folks have said nomodeset is really suboptimal, is a last resort, and
suggests there are other problems going on that need to be fixed.

[1]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/ImprovedGrubMenu

Perhaps if the basic video choices go in the submenu?


--
Chris Murphy